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SPARE MINUTE SERIES. 



CHEERFUL WORDS, 



FROM THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE MACDONALD. 



SELECTED BY 



E. E. BROWN 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

JAMES T. FIELDS 






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BOSTON^ 




'"£" 



D. LOTHROP & CO., 

FRANKLIN STREET CORNER OF HAWLEY. 

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Copyright by 

D. LOTHROP & COMPANY. 

1880. 



INTRODUCTION. 



IT must be a very remote corner of America, indeed, 
where the writings of George MacDonald would not only be 
knowrv but ardently loved. David Elginbrod, Ranald Ban- 
nerman. Alec Forbes, Robert Falconer, and Little Diamond 
have many friends by this time all over the land, and are 
just as real personages, thousands of miles west of New 
York and Boston, as they are hereabouts. Now there must 
be some good reason for this exceptional universality of 
recognition, and it is not at all difficult to discern why 
MacDonald's characters should be welcome guests every- 
where. The writer who speaks through his beautiful crea- 
tures of imagination, imploring us to believe that 

" Every human heart is human. 
That in even savage bosoms 
There are longings, yearnings, strivings 
For the good they comprehend not. 
That the feeble hands and helpless 
Groping blindly in the darkness 

3 



4 Introduction. 

Touch God's right hand in that darkness 
And are lifted up and strengthened — " 

that writer, if he be a master of his art, like MacDonald, 
will be a light and a joy in every household, however 
situated. 

It is pleasant, always, to hold up for admiration the 
authors who have borne witness to the eternal beauty and 
cheerful capabilities of the universe around us, whatever 
may be our own petty sufferings or discomforts ; who con- 
tinually teach us that Optimism is better than Pessimism, 
and much more moral as a conduct of life, and are lovingly 
reminding us, whenever they write books or poems, of the 
holiness of helpfulness. All MacDonald's pages are a pro- 
test against selfishness, and that mean and narrow spirit 
which would elevate our petty selves above our contempo- 
raries, and arrogate to an individual catalogue all the virtues 
that are attainable by mortal acquirement. 

Heine observes, somewhere, that we must not investigate 
too curiously the lives of prominent men. " They are, often- 
times," says the witty poet, " like the bright gleams of light 
which glow so brilliantly that we think they must be jewels 
hung on leaf and twig by king's children at play in the royal 
gardens — but if we search for them by day we find no 
glittering gem, but only a repulsive little insect, which 
crawls painfully away, and which our feet do not crush, 
only for some strange compassion." The personality of the 
author from whom these happily-chosen extracts have 
been made, will bear the closest inspection at any and 
at all times. As a novelist, an essayist, a poet, and a 
preacher, he stands always in broad sunlight, and no 
dark shadow ever rests upon the dial of his pure and 



Introduction. 5 

healthy inspiration. Those of us who know the man, and 
love the sound of his pleasant voice, so full of tender sym- 
pathy with all that is best and strengthening in human 
life, on comparing notes, would not hesitate to claim for 
him the eulogy expressed in these beautiful old sixteenth 
century verses — verses embalming an exceptional charac- 
ter, and one which the abiding Wisdom of Poesy never 
ceases to hold up for our pattern, in all that exalts and 
dignifies the soul of man and woman. 

" Within these woods of Arcadie ' 

He chief delight and pleasure tooke 

And on the mountain Parthenie, 

Upon the chrystall liquid brooke : 

The muses met him every day, 

That taught him sing, to write and say. 



A sweet attractive kind of grace, 

A full assurance given by lookes, 

Continuall comfort in a face, 

The lineaments of Gospell bookes; 

I trowe that countenance cannot lie, 
Whose thoughts are legible in the eie. 

Was never eie did see that face, 

Was never eare did heere that tongue, 

Was never minde did minde his grace, 

That ever thought the travell longe ; 

But eies and eares, and every thought 
Were with his sweet perfections caught." 

James T. Fields. 



GEORGE MACDONALD, M.A„ L.L.D. 



GEORGE MacDonald, preacher, poet, novelist and 
essayist, was born in Huntley, Aberdeenshire, 
in the year 1825. His father was at that time one 
of the proprietors of the Huntley Mills ; and the 
annals of the little parish show that he was a lineal 
descendant of the MacDonalds of Glencoe — those 
" Lords of the Isles " whose stern resistance to arbi- 
trary rule form one of the most thrilling episodes in 
Scottish history. 

The wild picturesqueness of that early home in the 
heart of Aberdeenshire, its snow-capped peaks, its 
mountain torrents, its lochs and its firths, its deep 
ravines, its dreary moors, must all have exerted a 
strong, moulding influence upon the impressible nature 
of the dreamy, enthusiastic boy. We can imagine him 
"going out to meet the spring," as he himself describes 

7 



8 George MacDonald. 

Hugh, in David Elginbrod, and finding in Nature " the 
grand, pure, tender Mother, ancient in years, yet ever 
young . . . From the depths of air, from the winds that 
harp upon the boughs and trumpet upon the great 
caverns, from the streams, from the flowers, she spoke 
to him. And he felt that she had a power to heal and 
to instruct ; yea, that she was a power of life, and 
could speak to the heart and conscience mighty words 
about God and Truth and Love." 

At an early age he entered the University of Aber- 
deen, and after his graduation he studied for the min- 
istry at Owen's college, Manchester, and at Indiana 
college, in Highbury, London. 

Upon taking holy orders, he became a leader of the 
"Independents" and preached for some time in the 
counties of Surrey and Sussex. 

In the year 1855, he published his first book, a dra- 
matic poem entitled Within and Without, and this was 
soon followed by A Hidden Life. Of these two poems, 
an able critic says, " We can find nothing in the sub- 
sequent writings of MacDonald of which the substance 
(by which we mean more than the germ) is not to be 
grasped here." Aside from the fine dramatic passages 
in Within and Without, there are many minor poems 
incidental to the scenes, such as the sonnet, 
" And weep not though the beautiful decay," 

and the sweet child-poem, 

" Little white lily sat by a stone," 
that have already become classical. 

In 1857, MacDonald travelled on the continent, and 
visited Algiers before his return home. Possibly to 



George MacDonald. 9 

the bewitching atmosphere of the East, as well as to 
these months of enforced leisure, is due the fresh kind- 
ling of his imagination which bore fruit the following 
year in his publication of Phantastes, that beautiful 
Faerie Romance which received so many warm encomi- 
ums from Dickens. In this wonderful story of the man 
who went out to seek his ideal, and ended by being 
glad at having lost his shadow, the symbols are easily 
interpreted, and the whole allegory is full of dainty 
touches and fine episodes. 

In the interval that followed, before the publication 
in 1863, of his first novel, David Elginbrod, many 
charming poems and thoughtful essays from the pen 
of MacDonald occur in the periodical literature of 
the day. Among the poems may be mentioned Light, 
which reminds one strongly of Wordsworth's Ode to 
Immortality ; and Somnium Mystici — an exquisite dream 
picture of the soul laid asleep in the world beyond, 
awakened for the new life, and trained through succes- 
sive stages of discipline for the coming of the Son 
of Man, in whom all beauty and all love are seen to be 
consummated. 

The Portent, published in 1864, is a highly imagina- 
tive romance, founded upon the old Scottish belief of 
the Inner Vision or Second Sight. As a story it is 
unsatisfactory, but it is an original, masterly produc- 
tion — fulfilling throughout its own natural conditions 
— and by some critics it is considered MacDonald's 
best work. 

In 1865, Alec Forbes of Howglcn, was published ; and 
in the two following years, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with 
the Fairies, The Disciple and Other Poems, and Unspoken 



io George MacDonald. 

Sermons, revealed still more clearly the growing power 
of a writer whose name was now well known on both 
sides the water. 

When, a few years later, he visited the United States, 
it was no stranger, but an honored and dearly-loved 
friend, whom we welcomed to our shores ; and the re- 
membrance of his kindly face and " cheerful words " 
as he spoke to us in church and lecture room comes 
up vividly before us, as we write. 

In Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, and its sequel, 
The Seaboard Parish, we begin to realize the intense 
sympathy of MacDonald, not only with the soul of 
Nature, but also with the great throbbing heart of 
humanity. 

As some writer has happily expressed it, ''Of all life 
considered as a chain ; of its actions and reactions ; 
of life as an ascent of pulsations up to the Divine, 
MacDonald has an electrical consciousness ; and it 
runs through all his writings. This gives his imagina- 
tion a buoyancy which permits him to lay burdens on 
light wings — but they float, and we are deeply im- 
pressed, though the brightness of the page is not for 
a moment dimmed." 

The breadth and manliness of tone and sentiment, 
the deep perceptions of human nature, the orig- 
inality, fancy, pathos, the fresh out-of-door atmos- 
phere, everywhere apparent — above all, the earnest, 
wholesome, but always unobtrusive religious teaching, 
that underlies all his writings, give to the works of 
George MacDonald a certain magnetic power that is 
indescribable. 



George MacDonald, II 

Robert Falconer, published in 1868, is one of the 
most powerful novels of the nineteenth century ; and 
yet as we peruse some of the later works of the author, 
St. George and St. Michael, for instance, Wilfred Cum- 
bermede, Malcolm, Marquis of -Zossie, and Sir Gibbie, 
the steady growth of the writer's abilities incline us 
to think that the best work of George MacDonald is 
yet to come. E. E. B. 



CHEERFUL WORDS. 



i. 



WHEN we look towards winter from the last 
borders of autumn, it seems as if we could 
not encounter it, and as if it would never go over. So 
does threatened trouble of any kind seem to us as we 
look forward upon its miry ways from the last borders 
of the pleasant greensward on which we have hitherto 
been walking. But not only do both run their course, 
but each has its own alleviations, its own pleasures • 
and very marvelously does the healthy mind fit itself 
to the new circumstances ; while to those who will 
bravely take up their burden and bear it, asking no 
more questions than just, " Is this my burden ? " a 
13 



14 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

thousand ministrations of nature and life will come 
with gentle comfortings. Across a dark, verdureless 
field will blow a wind through the heart of the winter 
which will wake in the patient mind not a memory, 
merely, but a prophecy of the spring, with a glimmer 
of crocus, or snowdrop, or primrose ; and across the 
waste of tired endeavor will a gentle hope, coming 
he knows not whence, breathe spring-like upon the 
heart of the man around whom life looks desolate and 
dreary. 

Well do I remember a friend of mine telling me 
once — he was then a laborer in the field of literature, 
who had not yet begun to earn his penny a day, though 
he worked hard — telling me how once, when a hope 
that had kept him active for months was suddenly 
quenched — a book refused on which he had spent a 
passion of labor — the weight of money that must be 
paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the 
coffin-lid that had lately covered the only friend to 
whom he could have applied confidently for aid — 
telling me, I say, how he stood at the corner of a 
London street, with the rain dripping black from the 
brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about 
him in the closing afternoon of the city when the 
rich men were going home and the poor men who 
worked for them were longing to follow ; and how 
across this waste came energy and hope into his 
bosom, swelling thenceforth with courage to fight, and 



TRUST IN GOD. 15 

yield no ear to suggested failure. And the story would 
not be complete — though it is for the fact of the 
arrival of unexpected and apparently unfounded hope, 
that I tell it — if I did not add, that, in the morning, 
his wife gave him a letter which their common trouble 
of yesterday had made her forget, and which had lain 
with its black border all night in the darkness, unop- 
ened, waiting to tell him how the vanished friend had 
not forgotten him on her death-bed, but had left him 
enough to take him out of all those difficulties, and 
give him strength and time to do far better work than 
the book which had failed of birth. Some of my 
readers may doubt whether I am more than " a wan- 
dering voice," but whatever I am, or may be thought 
to be, my friend's story is true. 



II. 



How often do we look upon God as our last and 
feeblest resource ! We go to Him because we have 
nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the 
storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, 
but into the desired haven : that we have been com- 
pelled, as to the last remaining, so to the best, the 
only, the central help, the causing cause of all the 
helps to which we had turned aside as nearer and 
better. 



i6 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

III. 

If we only act as God would have us, other consid- 
erations may look after themselves — or, rather He 
will look after them. The world will never be right 
till the mind of God is the measure of things, and 
the will of God the law of things. In the kingdom 
of Heaven nothing else is acknowledged. And till 
that kingdom come, the mind and will of God must, 
with those that look for that kingdom, override every 
other way of thinking, feeling and judging. 



IV. 



Having reached the river in the course of my wan- 
dering, I came down the side of it, loitering and look- 
ing, quiet in heart and soul and mind, because I had 
committed my cares to Him who careth for us. The 
earth was round me - — I was rooted, as it were, in it, 
but the air of a higher life was about me. I was 
swayed to and fro by the motions of a spiritual power ; 
feelings and desires and hopes passed through me, 
passed away and returned ; and still my head rose 
into the truth, and the will of God was the regnant 
sunlight upon it. I might change my place and con- 
dition ; new feelings might come forth, and old feel- 
ings retire into the lonely corners of my being ; but 
still my heart should be glad and strong in the one 



TRUST IN GOD. 17 

changeless thing, in the truth that maketh free ; still 
my head should rise into the sunlight of God, and I 
should know that because He lived I should live also, 
and because He was true I should remain true also, 
nor should any change pass upon me that should make 
me mourn the decadence of humanity. And then I 
found that I was gazing over the stump of an old 
pollard, on which I was leaning, down on a great bed 
of white water lilies, that lay in the broad slow river, 
here broader and slower than in most places. The 
slanting yellow sunlight shone through the water down 
to the very roots anchored in the soil, and the water 
swathed their stems with coolness and freshness, and 
a universal sense, I doubt not, of watery presence and 
nurture. And there on their lovely heads, as they lay 
on the pillow of the water, shone the life-giving light 
of the summer sun, filling all the spaces between their 
outspread petals of living silver with its sea of radi- 
ance, and making them gleam with the whiteness 
which was born of them and the sun. 



V. 



It has been well said that no man ever sank under 
the burden of the day. It is when to-morrow's burden 
is added to the burden of to-day, that the weight is 
more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves 
so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at 



1 8 CHEERFUL WORDS 

least remember this : it is your doings, not God's. He 
begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the 
present. What more or what else could He do to 
take the burden off you ? Nothing else would do it. 
Money in the bank wouldn't do it ; He cannot do to- 
morrow's business for you beforehand to save you from 
fear about it. That would derange everything. What 
else is there but to tell you to trust in Him, irrespective 
of the fact that nothing else but such trust can put our 
heart at peace, from the very nature of our relation 
to Him, as well as the fact that we need these things. 
We think that we come nearer to God than the lower 
animals do by our foresight. But there is another 
side to it. We are like to Him with whom there 
is no past or future, with whom a day is as a thousand 
years, and a thousand years as one day, when we live 
with large bright spiritual eyes, doing our work in the 
great present, leaving both past and future to Him 
to whom they are ever present, and fearing nothing, 
because He is in our future, as much as He is in our 
past, as much as, and far more than, we can feel Him 
to be in our present. Partakers thus of the divine 
nature, resting in that perfect All-in-all in whom our 
nature is eternal too, we walk without fear, full of 
hope, and courage, and strength to do His will, waiting 
for the endless good which He is always giving, as 
fast as He can get us able to take it in. Would not 
this be to be more of gods than Satan promised to 



TRUST IN GOD. 19 

Eve? To live carelessly divine, duty-doing, fearless, 
loving, self-forgetting lives — is not that more than to 
know both good and evil — lives in which the good, 
like Aaron's rod, has swallowed up the evil, and turned 
it into good ? For pain and hunger are evils ; but if 
faith in God swallows them up, do they not so turn 
into good? 

VI. 

" N,o doubt," resumed Old Rogers, " King Solomon 
was quite right, as he always was, I suppose, in what he 
taid, for his wisdom mun ha' laid mostly in the tongue — 
right, I say, when he said, ' Boast not thyself of to- 
morrow ; for thou knowest not what a day may bring 
forth ; ' but I can't help thinking there's another side 
to it. I think it would be as good advice to a man on 
the other tack, whose boasting lay far to windward, and 
he close on a lee-shore wi' breakers — it wouldn't be 
amiss to say to him, ' Don't strike your colors to the 
morrow ; for thou knowest not what a day may bring 
forth.' There's just as many good days as bad ones ; 
as much fair weather as foul in the days to come. 
And if a man keeps up heart, he's all the better for 
that, and none the worse when the evil day does come. 
But God forgive me ! I'm talking like a heathen. As 
if there was any chance about what the days would 
bring forth. No, my lad," said the old sailor, assuming 
the dignity of his superior years under the inspiration 



20 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of the truth, " boast nor trust nor hope in the morrow. 
Boast and trust and hope in God, for thou shalt yet 
praise Him, who is the health of thy countenance and 
thy God." " 

VII. 

Janet sat — knitting busily, and praying with counte- 
nance untroubled, amidst the rush of the seaward tor- 
rents, the mad howling and screeching of the wind, and 
the lowing of the imprisoned cattle. m 

" Oh, Lord," she said in her great trusting heart, 
" gien my bonny man be droonin i' the water, or deein' 
o' cauld on the hillside, haud 's han\ Binna far frae 
him, O Lord ; dinna let him be fleyt." 

To Janet, what we call life and death were compara- 
tively small matters, but she was very tender over 
suffering and fear. She did not pray half so much for 
Gibbie's life, as for the presence with him of Him who 
is at the death-bed of every sparrow. She went on 
waiting, and refused to be troubled. True, she was not 
his bodily mother, but she loved him far better than the 
mother who, in such dread for her child, would have 
been mad with terror. The difference was, that Janet 
loved up as well as down, loved down so widely, so 
intensely, because the Lord of life, who gives his own 
to us, was more to her than any child can be to any 
mother, and she knew he could not forsake her Gibbie, 
and that his presence was more and better than life. 



TRUST IN GOD. 21 

She was unnatural, was she? — inhuman? Yes, if 
there be no such heart and source of humanity as she 
believed in ; if there be, then such calmness arid cour- 
age and content as hers, are the mere human and 
natural condition to be hungered after by every aspiring 
soul. Not until such condition is mine shall I be able 
to regard life as a godlike gift, except in the hope that 
it is drawing nigh. Let him who understands, under- 
stand better ; let him not say the good is less than per- 
fect, or excuse his supineness and spiritual sloth by 
saying to himself that a man can go too far in his 
search after the divine, can seJl too much of what he 
has, to buy the field of the treasure. Either there is no 
Christ of God, or my all is His. 

VIII. 

A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear. 
It is in the cracks, crannies, and gulfy faults of our 
belief, the gaps that are not faith, that the snow of 
apprehension settles, and the ice of unkindness forms. 



IX. 



It may be good for you to go hungry and barefoot ; 
but it must be utter death to have no faith in God. 
It is not, however, in God's way of things that the 
man who does his work shall not live by it. We do 



22 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

not know why here and there a man may be left to die 
of hunger, but I do believe that they who wait upon 
the Lord shall not lack any good. What it may be 
good to deprive a man of till he knows and acknowl- 
edges whence it comes, it may be still better to give 
him when he has learned that every good and every 
perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the 
Father of lights. 



X. 



You have a disagreeable duty to do at twelve o'clock. 
Do not blacken nine and ten and eleven, and all be- 
tween, with the color of twelve. Do the work of each, 
and reap your reward in peace. So when the dreaded 
moment in the future becomes the present, you shall 
meet it walking in the light, and that light will over- 
come its darkness. How often do men who have 
made up their minds what to say and do under certain 
expected circumstances, forget the words and reverse 
the actions ! The best preparation is the present well 
seen to, the last duty done. For this will keep the eye 
so clear and the body so full of light that the right 
action will be perceived at once, the right words will 
rush from the heart to the lips, and the man, full of 
the Spirit of God because he cares for nothing but 
the will of God, will trample on the evil thing in love, 
and be sent, it may be, in a chariot of fire to the 



TRUST IN GOD. 23 

presence of his Father, or stand unmoved amid the 
cruel mockings of the men he loves. 



XI. 



I should like to know a man who just minded his 
duty and troubled himself about nothing; who did 
his own work and did not interfere with God's. How 
nobly he would work — working not for reward, but 
because it was the will of God ! How happily he 
would receive his food and clothing, receiving them 
as the gifts of God ! What peace would be his ! What 
a sober gayety! How hearty and infectious his 
laughter ! What, a friend he would be ! How sweet 
his sympathy ! And his mind would be so clear he 
would understand everything. His eye being single, 
his whole body would be full of light. No fear of his 
ever doing a mean thing. He would die in a ditch 
rather. It is this fear of want that makes men do 
mean things. They are afraid to part with their pre- 
cious lord — mammon. He gives no safety against 
such a fear. One of the richest men in England is 
haunted with the dread of the work-house. This man 
whom I should like to know, would be sure that God 
would have him liberal, and he would be what God 
would have him. Riches are not in the least necessary 
to that. Witness our Lord's admiration of the poor 
widow with her great farthing. 



24 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

XII. 

No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over 
him from behind. But if it lay before us, and we could 
watch its current approaching from a long distance, 
what could we do with it before it had reached the 
now ? In like wise a man thinks foolishly who imag- 
ines he could have done this and that with his own 
character and development, if he had but known this 
and that in time. Were he as good as he thinks him- 
self wise, he could but at best have produced a fine 
cameo in very low relief : with a work in the round, 
which he is meant to be, he could have done nothing. 
The one secret of life and development, is not to devise 
and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work — to do 
every moment's duty aright — that being the part in the 
process allotted to us ; and let come — not what will 
for there is no such thing — but what the eternal 
Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of 
us from the first. If men would but believe that they 
are in process of creation, and consent to be made — 
let their Maker handle them as the potter his clay, 
yielding themselves in respondent motion and submis- 
sive hopeful action with the turning of his wheel, they 
would ere long find themselves able to welcome every 
pressure of that hand upon them, even when it was felt 
in pain, and sometimes not only to believe but to rec- 
ognize the divine end in view, the bringing of a son 



TRUST IN GOD. 25 

into glory : whereas, behaving like children who struggle 
and scream while their mother washes and dresses 
them, they find they have to be washed and dressed, 
notwithstanding, and with the more discomfort ; they 
may even have to find themselves set half naked and 
but half dried in a corner, to come to their right minds, 
and ask to be finished. 

XIII. 

u It's right to trust in God ; but if you don't stand to 
your halliards, your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll 
be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a mar- 
linspike." 

XIV. 

How is the work of the world to be done if 
we take no thought ? We are nowhere told not to 
take thought. We must take thought. The question 
is — What are we to take or not to take thought about ? 
By some who do not know God, little work would 
be done if they were not driven by anxiety of some 
kind. But you, friends, are you content to go with 
the nations of the earth, or do you seek a better way — 
the way that the Father of nations would have you 
walk in? 

What, then, are we to take thought about? Why, 
about our work. What are we not to take thought 



26 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

about ? Why, about our life. The one is our business : 
the other is God's. But you turn it the other way. 
You take no. thought of earnestness about the doing 
of your duty ; but you take thought of care lest God 
should not fulfill His part in the goings on of the 
world. A man's business is just to do his duty :• God 
takes upon Himself the feeding and the clothing. 
Will the work of the world be neglected if a man 
thinks of his work, his duty, God's will to be done, 
instead of what he is to eat, what he is to drink, and 
wherewithal he is to be clothed ? And remember, all 
the needs of the world come back to these three. You 
will allow, I think, that the work of the world will 
be only so much the better done ; that the very means 
of procuring the raiment or the food will be the more 
with Him. Hence the quiet fullness of ordinary nature ; 
hence the Spirit to them that ask it. 

XV. 

CONSIDER THE RAVENS. 

(A very old hymn.) 
Lord, according to Thy words, 
I have considered Thy birds ; 
And I find their life good, 
And better the better understood ; 
Sowing neither ^corn nor wheat, 
They have all that they can eat ; 
Reaping no more than they sow, 
They have all they can stow ; 



TRUST IN GOD. 27 

Having neither barn nor store, 
Hungry again, they eat more. 

Considering, I see too that . they 
Have a busy life, and plenty of play ; 
In the earth they dig their bills deep, 
And work well though they do not heap , 
Then to play in the air they are not loath, 
And their nests between are better than both. 

But this is when there blow no storms, 
When berries are plenty in winter, and worms; 
When their feathers are thick, and oil is enough 
To keep the cold out and the rain off. 
If there should come a long hard frost, 
Then it looks as Thy birds were lost. 

But I consider further and find 

A hungry bird has a free mind ; 

He is hungry to-day, not to-morrow ; 

Steals no comfort, no grief doth borrow ; 

This moment is his, Thy will hath said it, 

The next is nothing till Thou hast made it. 

The bird has pain, but has no fear, 
Which is the worst of any gear ; 
When cold and hunger and harm betide him, 
He gathers them not, to stuff inside him ; 
Content with the day's ill he has got, 
He waits just, nor haggles with his lot; 
Neither jumbles God's will 
With driblets from his own still. 



28 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

But next I see in my endeavor, 
Thy birds here do not live forever ; 
That cold or hunger, sickness or age. 
Finishes their earthly stage ; 
The rook drops without a stroke, 
And never gives another croak; 
Birds lie here, and birds lie there, 
With little feathers all astare ; 
And in Thy own sermon, Thou 
That the sparrow falls, dost allow. 

It shall not cause me any alarm, 
For neither so comes the bird to harm, 
Seeing our Father, Thou hast said, 
Is by the sparrow's dying bed. 
Therefore it is a blessed place, 
And the sparrow in high grace. 

It cometh therefore to this, Lord : 
I have considered Thy word, 
And henceforth will be Thy bird. 

XVI. 

If I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life 
of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked 
with God. He is in no haste ; and if I do what I may 
in earnest, I need not mourn if I work no great work on 
the earth. Let God make His sunsets : I will mottle 
my little fading cloud. To help the growth of a thought 
that struggles towards the light ; to brush with gentle 



ASPIRA TION. 29 

hand the earth-stain from the white of one snowdrop — 
such be my ambition ! So shall I scale the rocks in 
front, not leave my name carved upon those behind 
me. 

XVII. 

Whatever is capable of aspiring, must be troubled 
that it may wake and aspire — then troubled still, that 
it may hold fast, be itself, and aspire still. 

XVIII. 

If any one judge it hard that men should be made 
with ambitions to whose objects they can never attain, 
I answer, ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration ; 
and no man ever followed the truth, which is the one 
path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he 
had been made this way or that. Man is made to be 
that which he is made most capable of desiring — but 
it goes without saying that he must desire the thing 
itself and not its shadow. Man is of the truth, and 
while he follows a lie, no indication his nature yields 
will hold, except the fear, the discontent, the sickness ' 
of soul, that tell him he is wrong. If he say : " I care 
not for what you call the substance — it is to me the 
shadow ; I want what you call the shadow," the only 
answer is, that to all eternity he can never have it ; a 
shadow can never be had. 



30 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

XIX. 

I doubt whether there is a single history — if one 
could only get at the whole of it — in which there is not 
a considerable admixture of the unlikely, become fact, 
including a few strange coincidences ; of the uncommon 
which, although striking at first, has grown common 
from familiarity with its presence as our own ; with 
even, at least, some one more or less rosy touch of what 
we call the romantic. My own conviction is that the 
poetry is far the deepest in us, and that the prose is 
only broken down poetry ; and likewise that to this our 
lives correspond. The poetic region is the true one, 
and just, therefore, the incredible one to the lower order 
of mind ; for although every mind is capable of the 
truth, or rather capable of becoming capable of the 
truth, there may lie ages between its capacity and the 
truth. As you will hear some people read poetry so 
that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some peo- 
ple read their own lives and those of others. 



XX. 



The highest poetic feeling of which we are now con- 
scious, springs not from the beholding of perfected 
beauty, but from the mute sympathy which the creation 
with all its children manifests with us in the groaning 
and travailing which look for the sonship. Because of 



TRUE POETRY. 31 

our need and aspiration, the snowdrop gives birth in 
our hearts to a loftier spiritual and poetic feeling than 1 
the rose most complete in form, color, and odor. The 
rose is of paradise ; the snowdrop is of the striving, 
hoping, longing earth. Perhaps our highest poetry is 
the expression of our aspirations in the sympathetic 
forms of visible nature. Nor is this merely a longing 
for a restored paradise ; for then in the ordinary history 
of men, no man or woman that has fallen can be re- 
stored to the position formerly held. Such must rise 
to a yet higher place, whence they can behold their 
former standing far beneath their feet. They must be 
restored by the attainment of something better than 
they ever possessed before or not at all. If the law be 
a weariness, we must escape it by taking refuge with 
the spirit, for not otherwise can we fulfill the law than 
by being above the law. To escape the overhanging 
rocks of Sinai, we must climb to its secret top. 

" Is thy strait horizon dreary, 
Is thy foolish fancy chill ? 
Change the feet that have grown weary, 
For the wings that never will." 

XXI. 

The frost is hard upon old people, and the spring is 
so much the more genial and blessed in its sweet influ- 



32 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

ences on them. Do we grow old that, in our weakness 
and loss of physical self-assertion, we may learn the 
benignities of the universe — only to be learned first 
through the feeling of their want ? I do not envy the 
man who laughs the east wind to scorn. He can never 
know the balmy power of its sister of the West, which 
is the breath of the Lord, the symbol of the one genial 
strength at the root of all life, resurrection, and growth 
— commonly called the Spirit of God. Who has not 
seen, as the infirmities of age grow upon old men, the 
haughty, self-reliant spirit that had neglected, if not 
despised, the gentle ministration of love, grow, as it 
were, a little scared, and begin to look about for some 
kindness ; begin to return the warm pressure of the 
hand, and to submit to be waited upon by the anxiety 
of love ? Not in weakness alone comes the second 
childhood upon men, but often in childlikeness : for in 
old age, as in nature, 

Old autumn's fingers 
Paint in hues of spring. 

XXII. 

" People don't care about a bag of old bones when 
they can get hold of young men. Well, well, never 
mind, old woman. The Lord'll take us through some 
how. When the wind blows, the ship goes : when the 



OLD AGE. 33 

wind drops, the ship stops ; but the sea is His all the 
same, for He made it ; and the wind is His all the 
same too." 

XXIII. 

Age is such a different thing in different natures ! 
One man seems to grow more and more selfish as he 
grows older ; and in another the slow fire of time seems 
only to consume, with fine, imperceptible gradations, 
the yet lingering selfishness in him, letting the light of 
the kingdom, which the Lord says is within, shine out 
more and more, as the husk grows thin and is ready to 
fall off, that the man, like the seed sown, may pierce 
the earth of this world, and rise into the pure air and 
wind and dew of the second life. The face of a loving 
old man is always to me like a morning moon, reflecting 
the yet unrisen sun of the other world, yet fading before 
its approaching light, until, when it does rise, it pales 
and withers away from our gaze, absorbed in the source 
of its own beauty. 

XXIV. 

Let any one tell me something that has happened to 
himself, especially if he will give me a peep into how 
his heart took it, as it sat in its own little room with 
the closed door, and that person will, so telling, absorb 



34 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

my attention ; he has something true and genuine and 
valuable to communicate. They are mostly old people 
that can do so. Not that young people have nothing 
happen to them, but that only when they grow old, are 
they able to see things right, to disentangle confusions, 
and judge righteous judgment. Things which at the 
time appeared insignificant or wearisome, then give out 
the light that was in them, show their own truth, in- 
terest, and influence; they are far enough off to be 
seen. It is not when we are nearest to anything that 
we know best what it is. 

XXV. 

AUTUMN SONG. 

Autumn clouds are flying, flying, 

O'er the waste of blue. 
Summer flowers are dying, dying, 

Late so lovely new. 
Laboring trains are slowly rolling 

Home with winter grain; 
Holy bells are slowly tolling 

Over buried men. 

Goldener lights set noon asleeping 

Like an afternoon; 
Colder airs come stealing, creeping 

After sun and moon; 



OLD AGE. 35 



And the leaves all tired of blowing, 

Cloud-like o'er the sun, 
Change to sunset colors, knowing 

That their day is done. 

Autumn's sun is sinking, sinking 

Into winter's night ; 
And our hearts are thinking, thinking 

Of the cold and blight. 
Our life's sun is slowly going. 

Down the hill of night; 
Will our clouds shine golden-glowing 

On the slope of night. 

But the vanished corn is lying 

In rich golden glooms. 
In the churchyard all the sighing 

Is above the tombs. 
Spring will come, slow-lingering 

Opening buds of faith. 
Man goes forth to meet his spring 

Through the door of death. 

So we love with no less loving, 

Hair that turns to gray ; 
Or a step less lightly moving, 

In life's autumn day. 
And if thought, still-brooding, lingers 

O'er each bygone thing, 
'Tis because old autumn's fingers 

Paint in hues of spring. 



36 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

XXVI. 

The necessities of the old man prefigure and forerun 
the dawn of the immortal childhood. For is not our 
necessity towards God our highest blessedness — the 
fair cloud that hangs over the summit of existence ? 
Thank God, He has made His children so noble and 
high that they cannot do without "Him ! I believe we 
are sent into this world just to find this out. 

XXVII. 

The day was one of God's odes — written for men. 
Would that the days of our human autumn were as 
calmly grand, as gorgeously hopeful as the days that 
lead the aging year down to the grave of winter ! If 
our white hairs were sunlit from behind like those 
radiance-bordered clouds ; if our air were as pure as 
this when it must be as cold ; if the falling at last of 
longest-cherished hopes did but, like that of the forest 
leaves, let in more of the sky, more of the infinite possi- 
bilities of the region of truth which is the matrix of 
fact, we should go marching down the hill of life like a 
battered but still bannered army on its way home. But 
alas ! how often we rot, instead of march, towards the 
grave ! If the year was dying, it was dying at least with 
dignity. The sun was still revelling in the gift of him- 
self. A thin blue mist went up to greet him, like the 



OLD AGE. 37 

first of the smoke from the altars of the morning. The 
fields lay yellow below ; the rich colors of decay hung 
heavy on the woods, and seemed to clothe them as with 
the trappings of a majestic sorrow ; but the spider-webs 
sparkled with dew, and the gossamer films floated thick 
in the level sunbeams. It was a great time for the 
spiders, those visible deaths of the insect race. 
The sun, like a householder leaving his house for a 
time, was burning up a thousand outworn things before 
he went : hence the smoke of the dying hearth of 
summer was going up to the heavens ; but there was a 
heart of hope left, for, when farthest away, the sun is 
never gone, and the snow is the earth's blanket against 
the frost. 

XXVIII. 

" I'm growin' terrible auld, Janet," said Robert. 
" It's a sair thing this auld age, an' I canna bring my- 
sel' content wi' 't. Ye see I haena been used till 't." 

" That's true, Robert," answered Janet. " Gien we 
had been born auld, we micht by this time hae been at 
hame wi't. But syne what wad hae come o' the gran' 
delicht o' seein' auld age rin hirplin awa' frae the face 
o' the Auncient o' Days ? " 

" I wad fain be contentit wi' my lot, though," per- 
sisted Robert ; " but whan I fin' mysel' sae helpless like, 
I canna get it oot o' my heid 'at the Lord has forsaken 
me, an' left me to mak'an ill best o' 't wantin' Him.' 



38 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

" 1 wadna lat sic a thoucht come intil my heid, 
Robert, sae lang as I kenned I cudna draw breath nor 
wag tongue wantin' Him, for in Him we leeve an' muv 
an' hae oor bein.' Gien He be the life o' me, what for 
sud I trible myseF aboot that life ? " 

XXIX. 

Few sights can be lovelier than that of a man who 
having rushed up the staircase of fame in his youth — 
what matter whether the fame of a paltry world, or of a 
paltry sect of that world — comes slowly, gently, gra- 
ciously down in his old age, content to lose that which 
he never had, and careful only to be honest at last. 

XXX. 

The world seemed a grand march of resurrec- 
tion — out of every sorrow springing the joy at its 
heart, without which it could not have been a sorrow ; 
out of the troubles, and evils, and sufferings, and cruel- 
ties that clouded its history, ever rising the human 
race, the sons of God, redeemed in Him who had been 
made subject to death that He might conquer death 
for them and for His Father — a succession of mighty 
facts, whose meanings only God can evolve, only the 
obedient heart behold. 



HUMAN NA TURE. 39 

XXXI. 

I admit that the best things are the commonest, but 
the highest types and the best combinations of them are 
the rarest. There is more love in the world than any- 
thing else, for instance ; but the best love, and the in- 
dividual in whom love is supreme, are the rarest of all 
things. That for which humanity has the strongest 
claim upon its workmen is the representation of its 
own best ; but the loudest demand of the present day 
is for the representation of that grade of humanity of 
which men see the most — that type of things which 
could never have been but that it might pass. The 
demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-lev- 
elled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own — not 
that which might be, and ought to be its own — not its 
better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the 
sake of whose approach it exists. I do not think that 
the age is worse in this respect than those which have 
preceded it, but that vulgarity, and a certain vile con- 
tentment swelling to self admiration, have become more 
vocal than hitherto ; just as unbelief, which I think in 
reality less prevailing than in former ages, has become 
largely more articulate, and thereby more loud and 
peremptory. But whatever the demand of the age, I 
insist that that which ought to be presented to its be- 
holding, is the common good uncommonly developed, 
and that not because of its rarity, but because it is truer 



40 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

to humanity. Shall I admit those conditions, those 
facts, to be true exponents of humanity, which, except 
they be changed, purified, or abandoned, must soon 
cause that humanity to cease from its very name, must 
destroy its very being ? To make the admission would 
be to assert that a house may be divided against itself, 
and yet stand. It is the noble, not the failure from the 
noble, that is the true human ; and if I must show the 
failure, let it ever be with an eye to the final possible, 
yea, imperative, success. 

XXXII. 

Each house is a nest of human birds, over which brood 
the eternal wings of love and purpose. Only such 
different birds are hatched from the same nest ! And 
what a nest was then the city itself, with its university, 
its schools, its churches, its hospitals, its missions ; its 
homes, its lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, 
its houses viler still ; its factories, its ships, its great 
steamers, and the same humanity busy in all — here the 
sickly lady walking in the panoply of love, unharmed 
through the horrors of vicious suffering ; there the 
strong mother cursing her own child along half a street 
with an intensity and vileness of execration unheard 
elsewhere ! The will of the brooding spirit must be a 
grand one, indeed, to enclose so much of what cannot 
be its will, and turn all to its purpose of eternal good ! 



HUMAN NA TURE. 4 1 

Our knowledge of humanity, how much more our 
knowledge of the Father of it, is moving as yet but in 
the first elements. 

XXXIII. 

To Polwarth a human self was a shrine to be ap- 
proached with reverence, even when he bore deliver- 
ance in his hand. Anywhere, everywhere, in the 
seventh heaven or the seventh hell, he could worship 
God with the outstretched arms of love, the bended 
knees of joyous adoration, but in helping his fellow he 
not only worshipped but served God — ministered, 
that is, to the wants of God, doing it unto Him in the 
least of His. He knew that, as the Father unresting 
works for the weal of men, so every son following the 
Master-Son, must work also. Through weakness and 
suffering he had learned it. But he never doubted 
that his work as much as his bread would be given 
him, never rushed out wildly snatching at something 
to do for God, never helped a lazy man to break stones, 
never preached to foxes. It was what the Father gave 
him to do that he cared to do, and that only. It was 
the man next him that he ■ helped — the neighbor in 
need of the help he had. He did not trouble himself 
greatly about the happiness of men, but when the time 
and the opportunity arrived in which to aid the strug- 
gling birth of the eternal bliss, the whole strength of 
his being responded to the call. And now, having felt 



42 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

a thread vibrate, like a sacred spider he sat in the 
centre of his web of love, and waited and watched. 
In proportion as the love is pure, and only in pro- 
portion to -that, can such be a pure and real calling. 
The least speck of self will defile it ; a little more may 
ruin its most hopeful effort. 

XXXIV. 

The highest nature is the one that has the most 
necessities, but the fewest of its own making. He is 
not the greatest man who is the most independent, but 
he who thirsts most after a conscious harmony with 
every element and portion of the mighty whole ; de- 
mands from every region thereof its influences to per- 
fect his individuality ; regards that individuality as his 
kingdom, his treasure, not to hold but to give : sees in 
his self the one thing he can devote, the one precious 
means of freedom by its sacrifice, and that in no con- 
tempt or scorn, but in love to God and his children, the 
multitudes of his kind. By dying ever thus, ever thus 
losing his soul, he lives like God, and God knows him, 
and he knows God. This is too good to be grasped, 
but not too good to be true. The highest is that which 
needs the highest, the largest that which needs the 
most ; the finest and strongest that which to live must 
breathe essential life, self-willed life, God himself. It 
follows that it is not the largest or the strongest nature 



HUMAN NA TURE. 43 

that will feel a loss the least. An ant will not gather a 
grain of corn the less that his mother is dead, while a 
boy will turn from his books and his play and his 
dinner because his bird is dead ; is the ant therefore 
the stronger nature ? 

XXXV. 

When a man turns to look at himself, that moment 
the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade ; the pulsing 
fireflies throb paler in the passionate night ; an unseen 
vapor steams up from the marsh, and dims the star- 
crowded sky and the azure sea ; and the next moment 
the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more 
than a phosphorescent gleam — the summer lightning 
of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his 
own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, 
he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present 
thought outbodying him. The shoots of glad con- 
sciousness that come to the obedient man, surpass in 
bliss whole days and years of such ravined rapture as 
he gains, whose weariness is ever spurring the sides 
of his intent towards the ever retreating goal of his 
desires. I am a traitor even to myself if I would 
live without my life. But I withhold my pen ; for 
vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, 
or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He 
cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the pres- 



44 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

ence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of 
ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our truer 
self — God's idea of us when He devised us — the 
Christ in .us. Nothing but that self can displace 
the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of 
us are so fond and proud. And that self no man 
can find for himself ; seeing of himself he does not 
know even what to search for. " But as many as re- 
ceived him, to them gave he power to become the sons 
of God." 

XXXVI. 

When Mrs. Sclater went to bed that night she lay 
awake a good while thinking, and her main thought 
was, what could be the nature of the peculiar feeling 
which the stare of the boy had roused in her ? Nor was 
it long before she began to suspect that, unlike her 
hand beside his, she showed to some kind of disad- 
vantage beside the shepherd lad. Was it dissatisfac- 
tion then with herself that his look had waked ? She 
was aware of nothing in which she had failed, or been 
in the wrong of late. She never did anything to be 
called wrong — by herself, that is, or indeed by her 
neighbors. She had never done anything very wrong, 
she thought ; and anything wrong she had done, was 
now so far away and so nearly forgotten, that it seemed 
to have left her almost quite innocent ; yet the look of 
those blue eyes, searching, searching, without seeming 



HOMESICKNESS. 45 

to know it, made her feel something like the discomfort 
of a dream of expected visitors, with her house not 
quite in a condition to receive them. She must see to 
her hidden house. She must take dust-pan and broom 
and go about a little. For there are purifications in 
which king and cow-boy must each serve himself. The 
things that come out of a man are they that defile him, 
and to get rid of them, a man must go into himself, be 
a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell. Mrs. 
Sclater's cell was very tidy and respectable for a cell, 
but no human consciousness can be clean, until it lies 
wide open to the eternal sun, and the all-potent wind ; 
until, from a dim-lighted cellar, it becomes a mountain- 
top. 

XXXVII. 

Brothers, sisters ! do I not know your hearts from 
my own? — sick hearts which nothing can restore to 
health and joy but the presence of Him who is father 
and mother both in one. Sunshine is not gladness, 
because you see Him not. The stars are far away, 
because He is not near ; and the flowers, the smiles 
of old earth do not make you smile, because, although 
thank God ! you cannot get rid of the child's need, 
you have forgotten what it is the need of. The winter 
is dreary and dull, because, although you have the 
homeliest of homes, the warmest of shelters, the 
safest of nests to creep into and rest — though the 



46 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

most cheerful of fires is blazing for you, and a table 
is spread, waiting to refresh your frozen and weary 
hearts — you have forgotten the way thither, and will 
not be troubled to ask the way;, you shiver with the 
cold and hunger, rather than arise and say, " I will 
go to my Father;" you will die in the storm, rather 
than fight the storm; you will lie down in the snow 
rather than tread it under foot. The heart within 
you cries out for something, and you let it cry. It is 
crying for its God — for its father and mother and 
home. And all the world will look dull and gray — 
and if it does not look so now, the day will come 
when it must look so — till your heart is satisfied and 
quieted with the known presence of Him " in whom 
we live and move and have our being." 

XXXVII. 
LIFE'S JOURNEY. 

" Traveller, what lies over the hill ? 
Traveller tell to me ; 
I am only a child — from the window-sill, 
Over I cannot see." 

♦Child, there's a valley over there, 
Pretty and woodv and shy : 
And a little brook that says — ' Take care, 
Or I'll drown you by and by.'" 



LIFE'S JOURNEY. 47 

" And what comes next ? " — " A lonely moor, 
Without a beaten way ; 
And gray clouds sailing slow, before 
A wind that will not stay." 

" And then ? " " Dark rocks and yellow sand, 

And a moaning sea beside." 
" And then ? " — " More sea, more sea, more land, 

And rivers deep and wide." 

" And then ? " — " Oh ! rock and mountain and vale. 
Rivers and fields and men : 
Over and over — a weary tale — 

And round to your home again." 

" Is that the end ? It is weary at best." 
" No child ; it is not the end. 
On summer eves, away in the west, 
You will see a stair ascend ; 

"Built of all colors of lovely stones — 
A stair up into the sky; 
Where no one is weary, and no one moans. 
Or wants to be laid by." 

* I will go ! " — " But the steps are very steep ; 

If you would climb up there, 
You must lie at its foot, as still as sleep, 
And be a step of the stair. 

* For others to put their feet on you, 

To reach the stones high-piled ; 
Till Jesus comes and takes you, too, 
And leads you up, my child I " 



48 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

XXXIX. 

The twilight had deepened, merging into such night 
as the summer in that part of ScDtland knows — a 
sweet, pale memory of the past day. The sky was 
full of sparkles of pale gold in a fathomless blue ; 
there was no moon; the darker sea lay quiet below, 
with only a murmur about its lip, and fitfully reflected 
the stars. The soft wind kept softly blowing. A light 
shone at the harbor's mouth, and a twinkling was here 
and there visible in the town above ; but all was as 
if there were no life save in the wind and the sea and 
the stars. The whole feeling was as if something had 
been finished in heaven, and the outmost ripples of 
the following rest had overflowed, and were now 
pulsing faintly and dreamily across the bosom of the 
laboring earth, with feeblest suggestion of the mighty 
peace beyond. Alas, words can do so little ! even 
such a night is infinite. 



XL. 



How still the night was ! My soul hung, as it were 
suspended in stillness ; for the whole sphere of heaven 
seemed to be about me, the stars above shining as clear 
below in the mirror of the all but motionless water. 
It was a pure type of the " rest that remaineth " — 
rest, the one immovable centre wherein lie all the 



REST. 49 

stories of might, whence issue all forces, all influences 
of making and moulding. "And, indeed," I said to 
myself, "after all the noise, uproar, and strife that 
there is on the earth, after all the tempests, earth- 
quakes, and volcanic outbursts, there is yet more of 
peace than of tumult in the world. How many nights 
like this glide away in loveliness when deep sleep 
hath fallen upon men and they know neither how still 
their own repose, nor how beautiful the sleep of nature. 
Ah, what must the stillness of the kingdom be ? When 
the heavenly day's work is done, with what a gentle 
wing will the night come down ! But I bethink me, 
the rest there, as here, will be the presence of God ; 
and if we have Him with us, the battle-field itself will 
be — if not quiet, yet as full of peace as this night 
of stars." 

XLI. 

There is great power in quiet, for God is in it. Not 
seldom he seems to lay His hand on one of His chil- 
dren, as a mother lays hers on the restless one in 
his crib to still him. Then the child sleeps, but the 
man begins to live up from the lower depths of his 
nature. So the winter comes to still the plant whose 
life has been rushing to blossom and fruit. When the 
hand of God is laid upon a man, vain moan and strug- 
gle and complaint, it may be indignant outcry follows ; 
but when, outwearied, at last he yields, if it be but in 



50 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

dull submission to the inexorable, and is still, then the 
God at the heart of him, the God that is there, or the 
man could not be, begins to grow. 

XLII. 

With the new light came new promise and fresh 
hope. What should we poor humans do without our 
God's nights and mornings ? Our ills are all easier 
to help than we know — except the one ill of a central 
self, which God himself finds it hard to help. 

XLIII. 

All reading of the Book is not reading of the Word. 
11 Many that are first shall be last, and the last first." 
I know now that it was Jesus Christ and not theology 
that filled the hearts of the men that wrote those Epistles 
— Jesus Christ, the living God-man whom I found — not 
in the Epistles, but in the Gospels. The Gospels con- 
tain what the apostles preached — the Epistles what 
they wrote after the preaching. And until we under- 
stand the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ our 
brother-king — until we understand Him, until we have 
His Spirit, promised so freely to them that ask it — all 
the Epistles, the words of men who were full of Him, 
and wrote out of that fullness, who loved Him so utterly 
that by that very love they were lifted into the air of 



THE BIBLE. 51 

pure reason and right and would die for Him, and did 
die for Him, without two thoughts about it, in the very 
simplicity of no choice — the letters, I say, of such men 
are to us a sealed book. Until we love the Lord so as 
to do what He tells us, we have no right to have an 
opinion about what one of those men meant ; for all 
they wrote is about things beyond us. The simplest 
woman who tries not to judge her neighbor, or not to be 
anxious for the morrow, will better know what is best to 
know, than the best-read bishop without the one simple 
out-going of his highest nature in the effort to do the 
will of Him who thus spoke. 

XLIV. 

I never could believe that a man who did not find 
God in other places as well as in the Bible, ever found 
Him there at all. And I always thought, that to find 
God in other books, enabled us to see clearly that he 
was more in the Bible than in any other book, or all 
other books put together. 

XLV. 

It will not do any man good to fling even the Bible in 
his face. Nay, a roll of bank-notes, which would be 
more evidently a good to most men, would carry insult 
with it, if presented in that manner. You cannot 



52 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

expect people to accept before they have had a chance 
of seeing what the offered gift really is. 

XLVI. 

The clergyman must never be a partisan. When 
our Lord was requested to act as umpire between 
two brothers He refused. But He spoke and said, 
" Take heed, and beware of covetousness." Now, 
though the best of men is unworthy to loose the latchet 
of His shoe, yet the servant must be as his Master. 
Ah me ! while I write it, I remember that the sinful 
woman might yet do as she would with His sacred 
feet. I bethink me : Desert may not touch His shoe 
tie : Love may kiss His feet. 

XLVIL 

I have never been able to see the very great difference 
between right and wrong in a clergyman, and right and 
wrong in another man. All that I can pretend to have 
yet discovered comes to this : that what is right in 
another man is right in a clergyman ; and what is wrong 
in another man is much worse in a clergyman. 

XLVIII. 

" I'm an old salt — an old man-o'-war's man — 



THE PARSON. 53 

and I've been all round the world, sir ; " said 
Old Rogers, " and I ha' been in all sorts o' com- 
pany, pirates and all, sir; and I ain't a bit fright- 
ened of a parson. No, I love a parson, sir. And 
I'll tell you for why, sir. He's got a good telescope, 
and he gits to the masthead, and he looks out. And 
he sings out, 'Land ahead!' or "Breakers ahead! 
and he gives directions accordin'. Only I can't always 
make out what he says. But when he shuts up his spy- 
glass, and comes down the riggin' and talks to us like 
one man to another, then I don't know what I should 
do without the parson." 

XLIX. 

All through the slowly-fading afternoon, the autumn 
of the day, when the colors are richest and the shadows 
long and lengthening, I paced my solemn old-thoughted 
church. Sometimes I went up into the pulpit and 
sat there, looking on the ancient walls which had grown 
up under men's hands, that men might be helped to 
pray by the visible symbol of unity which the walls 
gave, and that the voice of the Spirit of God might 
be heard exhorting men to forsake the evil and choose 
the good. And I thought how many witnesses to the 
truth had knelt in those ancient pews. For as the 
great church is made up of numberless communities, 
so is the great shining orb of witness-bearers made 



54 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

up of millions of lesser orbs. All men and women 
of true heart bear individual testimony to the truth 
of God, saying, " I have trusted and found Him faith- 
ful." And the feeble light of the glowworm is yet light, 
pure, and good, and with a loveliness of its own. " So, 
O Lord," I said, " let my light shine before men." 
And I felt no fear of vanity in such a prayer, for I 
knew that the glory to come of it is to God only — 
" that men may glorify their Father in heaven." 



L. 



The parson of a parish must be content to keep the 
upper windows of his mind open to the holy winds and 
the pure lights of heaven ; and the side windows of 
tone, of speech, of behavior, open to the earth, to let 
forth upon his fellow-men the tenderness and truth 
which those upper influences bring forth in any reason 
exposed to their operation. Believing in his Master, 
such a servant shall not make haste ; shall feel no 
feverous desire to behold the work of his hands ; shall 
be content to be as his Master, who waiteth long for 
the fruits of His earth. 



LI. 



If there be a living God, who is doing all He can 
to save men, to make them pure and noble and high, 



GOD IN NATURE. 55 

humble and loving and true, to make them live the 
• life He cares to live Himself ; if He has revealed and 
is revealing this to men, and needs for His purpose 
the work of their fellow-men, who have already seen 
and known this purpose — surely there is no nobler 
office than that of a parson ; for to him is committed 
the grand work of letting men see the thought of 
God, and the work of God — in a word of telling the 
story of Jesus, so that men shall see how true it is 
for now, how beautiful it is for ever ; and recognize 
it as in fact, the story of God. 



LII. 



Coming to a lane leading down to the river, I followed 
it, and then walked up a path outside the row of pol- 
lards, through a lovely meadow, where brown and white 
cows were eating, and shining all over the thick, deep 
grass. Beyond the meadow, a wood on the side of a 
rising ground went parallel with the river a long way. 
The river flowed on my right. That is, I knew that it 
was flowing, but I could not have told how I knew it, it 
was so slow. Still swollen, it was of a clear brown, in 
which you could see the browner trouts darting to and 
fro with such a slippery gliding, that the motion seemed 
the result of will, without any such intermediate and 
complicated arrangement as brain and nerves and mus- 
cles. The water-beetles went spinning about over the 



56 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

surface ; and one glorious dragon-fly made a mist about 
him with his long wings. And over all, the sun hung 
in the sky, pouring down life ; shining on the roots of 
the willows at the bottom of the stream ; lighting up 
the black head of the water-rat as he hurried across to 
the opposite bank ; glorifying the rich green lake of the 
grass ; and giving to the whole an utterance of love and 
hope and joy, which was, to him who could read it, a 
more certain and full revelation of God than any dis- 
play of power in thunder, in avalanche, in stormy sea. 
Those with whom the feeling of religion is only occa- 
sional, have it most when the awful or grand breaks out 
of the common ; the meek who inhabit the earth, find 
the God of the whole earth more evidently present — I 
do not say more present, for there is no measuring 
of His presence — more evidently in the commonest 
things. That which is best He gives most plentifully, 
as is reason with Him. Hence the quiet fullness of 
ordinary nature ; hence the Spirit to them that ask it. 

L1II. 

By slow degrees the summer bloomed. Green came 
instead of white ; rainbows instead of icicles. Gnarled 
old trees of May stood like altars of smoking perfume, 
or each like one million-petalled flower of upheaved 
whiteness — or of tender rosiness, as if the snow 
which had covered it in winter had *uik in and gath- 



GOD IN NATURE. 57 

ered warmth from the life of the tree, and now crept 
out again to adorn the summer. The long loops of 
the laburnum hung heavily with gold towards the sod 
below; and the air was full of the fragrance of the 
young leaves of the limes. Down in the valley below, 
the daisies shone in all the meadows, varied with the 
buttercup and the celandine ; while in damp places 
grew large pimpernels, and along the sides of the 
river, the meadow-sweet stood amongst the reeds at 
the very edge of the water, breathing out the odors 
of dreamful sleep. The clumsy pollards were each- 
one mass of undivided green. The mill-wheel had 
regained its knotty look, with its moss and its dip 
and drip, as it yielded to the slow water, which would 
have let it alone, but that there was no other way out 
of the land to the sea. I used now to wander about 
in the fields and woods, with a book in my hand, at 
which I often did not look the whole day, and which 
yet I liked to have with me. And I seemed some- 
how to come back with most upon those days in which 
I did not read. 

LIV. 

It was a lovely day, The sun shone so warm that 
you could not help thinking of what he would be 
able to do before long — draw primroses and butter- 
cups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive 
influences. But in the shadows lay fine webs and 



58 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

laces of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not 
but be glad of the cold that made the water able to 
please itself by taking such graceful forms. And I 
wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what 
could be the principle which, in the wildest, most 
lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious 
work of nature, always kept it. beautiful. The beauty 
of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I 
thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so 
loving, so good, so altogether what He wants us to 
be, so holy, therefore all His works declare Him in 
beauty ; His fingers can touch nothing but to mould 
it into loveliness ; and even the play of His elements 
is in grace and tenderness of form. 



LV. 



The clear pure light of the morning, made me long 
for the truth in my heart, which alone could make me 
pure and clear as the morning, tune me up to the 
concert-pitch of the nature around me. And the wind 
that blew from the sunrise, made me hope in the God 
who had first breathed into my nostrils the breath of 
life; that He would at length so fill me with His breath, 
His wind, His spirit, that I should think only His 
thoughts, and live His life, finding therein my own 
life, only glorified infinitely. 



GOD IN NA TURE. 59 

LVI. 

God, knowing our needs, built our house for our 
needs — not as one man may build for another, but as 
no man can build for himself. For our comfort, edu- 
cation, training, He has put into form for us, all the 
otherwise hidden thoughts and feelings of our heart. 
Even when He speaks of the hidden things of the 
Spirit of God, He uses the forms or pictures of nature. 
The world is, as it were, the human, unseen world, 
turned inside out, that we may see it. On the walls 
of the house that He has built for us, God has hung 
up the pictures — ever living, ever changing pictures — 
of all that passes in our souls. Form and color and 
motion are there — ever modelling, ever renewing, never 
wearying. Without this living portraiture from within, 
we should have no word to utter that should represent 
a single act of the inner world. Metaphysics could 
have no existence, not to speak of poetry, not to 
speak of the commonest language of affection. But 
all is done in such spiritual suggestion ; portrait and 
definition are so avoided ; the whole is in such fluent 
evanescence, that the producing mind is only aided, 
never overwhelmed. It never amounts to representa- 
tion. It affords but the material which the thinking, 
feeling soul can use, interpret, and apply for its own 
purposes of speech. It is, as it were, the forms of 
thought cast into a lovely chaos by the inferior laws 



60 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of matter, thence to be withdrawn by what we call 
the creative genius that God has given to men, and 
moulded, and modelled, and arranged, and built up 
to its own shapes and its own purposes. 

LVII. 

I turned and lingered by the old mill and fell pon- 
dering on the profusion of strength that rushed past 
the wheel away to the great sea, doing nothing. " Na- 
ture," I thought, "does not demand that power should 
always be force. Power itself must repose. " He that 
believeth shall not make haste," says the Bible. But 
it needs strength to be still. Is my faith not strong 
enough to be still ? I looked up to the heavens once 
more, and the quietness of the stars seemed to re- 
proach me. " We are safe up here. " they seemed to 
say : " We shine, fearless and confident, for the God 
who gave the primrose its rough leaves to hide it from 
the blast of uneven spring, hangs us in the awful 
hollows of space, We cannot fall out of His safety. 
' Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath 
created these things, that bringeth out their host by 
number : He calleth them all by names by the great- 
ness of his might, for that he is strong in power ; 
not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speak- 
est, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my 
judgment is passed over from my God ? ' " 



GOD IN NATURE. 6t 

LVIII. 

What has nature in common with the Bible and its 
metaphysics? She has a thousand things. The very- 
wind on my face seems to rouse me to fresh effort 
after a pure, healthy life ! Then there is the sunrise ! 
There is the snowdrop in the snow! There is the 
butterfly ! There is the rain of summer and the clear- 
ing of the sky after a storm ! There is the hen gath- 
ering her chickens under her wing ! I begin to doubt 
whether there be the commonplace anywhere, except 
in our own mistrusting nature, that will cast no care 
upon the unseen. 

LIX. 

O wind of God, that blowest in the mind, 

Blow, blow, and wake the gentle spring in me ; 

Blow, swifter blow, a strong warm summer wind. 
Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see, 
Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree, 

And our high-soaring song-larks meet Thy dove — 

High the imperfect soars, descends the perfect Love. 

Blow not the less though winter cometh then ; 

Blow, wind of God, blow hither changes keen; 
Let the spring creep into the ground again, 

The flowers close all their eyes not to be seen ; 

All lives in Thee that ever once hath been : t 
Blow, fill my upper air with icy storms : 
Breathe cold, O wind of God, and kill my canker-worms. 



62 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

LX. 

All about us, in earth and air, wherever eye or ear 
can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth 
in signs, now in a daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, 
a sunset ; a power that holds constant and sweetest 
relation with the dark and silent world within us ; that 
the same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we 
are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about 
us ; inside, the Spirit ; outside, the Word. And the two 
are ever trying to meet in us ; and when they meet, 
then the sign without, and the longing within, become 
one in light, and the man no more walketh in dark- 
ness, but knoweth whither he goeth. 

LXI. 

The face of nature is the face of God, and must 
bear expressions that can influence, though uncon- 
sciously to them, the most ignorant and hopeless of 
his children. 

LXII. 

"But you might have been drowned ! " she sobbed. 

"Nobody has a right to say that anything might 
have been, other than what has been. Before a thing 
has happened, we can say might or might not; but 



ARGUMENT. 63 

that has only to do with ignorance. Of course I am 
not speaking of things wherein we ought to exercise 
will and choice. That is our department. But this 
does not look like that now, does it ? Think what a 
change — from the dark night and the waving water, 
to this fullness of sunlight and the bare sands, with 
the water lisping on their edge away there in the 
distance. Now I want you to think that in life troubles 
will come which look as if they would never pass 
away : the night and the storm look as if they would 
last forever, but the calm and the morning cannot be 
stopped ; the storm in its very nature is transient. The 
effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is 
to return to its repose, for God is Peace." 

LXIII. 

It is a principle of mine never to push anything over 
the edge. When I am successful in any argument, my 
one dread is of humiliating my opponent. Indeed I 
cannot bear it. It humiliates me. And if you want 
him to think about anything, you must leave him room, 
and not give him such associations with the question 
that the idea of it will be painful and irritating to him. 
Let him have a hand in the convincing of himself. I 
have been surprised sometimes to see my own arguments 
come up fresh and green, when I thought the fowls of 
the air had devoured them up. When a man reasons 



64 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

for victory and not for the truth in the other soul, he is 
sure of just one ally, the same that Faust had in fight- 
ing Gretchen's brother — that is, the devil. But God 
and good men are against him. So I never follow up a 
victory of that kind, for, as I said, the defeat of the 
intellect is not the object in fighting with the sword of 
the Spirit, but the acceptance of the heart. 

LXIV. 

The man who is anxious to hold every point, will 
speedily bring a question to a mere dispute about trifles, 
leaving the real matter, whose elements may appeal to 
the God-like in every man, out in the cold. Such a 
man, having gained his paltry point, will crow like the 
bantam he is, while the other, who may be the greater, 
perhaps the better man, although in the wrong, is em- 
bittered by his smallness, and turns away with increased 
prejudice. Human nature can hardly be blamed for its 
readiness to impute to the case the shallowness of its 
pleader. Few men do more harm than those who, 
taking the right side, dispute for personal victory, and 
argue, as they are sure then to do, ungenerously. But 
even genuine argument for the truth is not preaching 
the Gospel, neither is he whose unbelief is thus assailed 
likely to be brought thereby into any mood but one 
unfit for receiving it. Argument should be kept to 
books : preachers ought to have nothing to do with it — 



CONTENTMENT. 65 

at all events in the pulpit. There let them hold forth 
light, and let him who will, receive it, and him who will 
not, forbear. God alone can convince, and till the full 
time is come for the birth of the truth in a soul, the 
words of even the Lord Himself are not there potent. 

LXV. 

CONTENTMENT. 

I am content. In trumpet tones, 

My song let people know ; 
And many a mighty man with thrones 

And sceptre, is not so. 
And if he is, I joyful cry, 
Why, then, he's just the same as I. 

The Mogul's gold, the Sultan's show 

His bliss, supreme too soon, 
Who, lord of all the world below, 

Looked up unto the moon — 
I would not pick it up — all that 
Is only fit for laughing at. 

My motto is — Content with this. 

Gold — place — I prize not such. 
That which I have, my measure is ; 

Wise men desire not much. 
Men wish and wish, and have their will, 
And wish again as hungry still. 

And gold and honor are besides 
A very brittle glass ; 



66 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

And time in his unresting tides, 

Makes all things change and pass, 
Turns riches to a beggar's dole ; 
Set's glory's race an infant's goal. 

Be noble — that is more than wealth; 

Do right — that's more than place; 
Then in the Spirit there is health, 

And gladness in the face ; 
Then thou art with thyself at one 
And, no man hating, fearest none. 

I am content. In trumpet tones, 

My song, let people know ; 
And many a mighty man with thrones 

And sceptre is not so. 
And if he is, I joyful cry 
Why, then, he's just the same as I. 

LXVI. 

It is a great thing to have the greetings of the uni- 
verse presented in fire and food. Let me, if I may, 
be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing 
hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers ; if I may not, 
let me then think how delightful they would be, and 
bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road 
to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. 
Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the 
world holds, and be content without it. But this we 
can never except by possessing the one thing, without 



CONTENTMENT. 67 

which I do not merely say no man ought to be 
content, but no man can be content — the Spirit of the 
Father. • 

LXVII. 

Can any one tell me why it is that, when the earth is 
renewing her youth in the spring, man should feel feeble 
and low spirited, and gaze with bowed head, though 
pleased heart, on the crocuses ; whereas, on the con- 
trary, in the autumn, when nature is dying for the winter, 
he feels strong and hopeful, holds his head erect, and 
walks with a vigorous step, though the flaunting dahlias 
discourage him greatly ? I do not ask for the physical 
causes : those I might be able to find out for myself, 
but I ask — Where is the Tightness and fitness in the 
thing ? Should not man and nature go together in this 
world which was made for man — not for science, but 
for man ? Perhaps I have some glimmerings of where 
the answer lies. Perhaps " I see a cherub that sees it." 
And in many of our questions we have to be content 
with such an approximation to an answer as this. And 
for my part I am content with this. With less, I am 
not content. 

LXVIII. 

My personal attraction is towards the poor rather 
than the rich. I was made so. I can generally get 
nearer the poor than the rich. But I say generally, for 



68 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

I have known a few rich people quite as much to my 
mind as the best of the poor. Thereupon, of course, 
their education would give them the advantage with me 
in the possibilities of communion. But when the heart 
is right, and there is a good stock of common sense as 
well — a gift predominant, as far as I am aware, in no 
one class over another, education will turn the scale 
very gently with me. And then when I reflect that 
some of these poor people would have made nobler 
ladies and gentlemen than all but two or three I know, 
if they had only had the opportunity, there is a reac- 
tion towards the poor, something like a feeling of favor 
because they have not had fair play — a feeling soon 
modified, though not altered, by the reflection that they 
are such because God, who loves them better than we 
do, has so ordered their lot, and ' by the recollection 
that not only was our Lord Himself poor, but He said 
the poor were blessed. And let me just say in passing 
that I not only believe it because He said it, but I be- 
lieve it because I see that it is so. I think sometimes 
that the world must have been especially created for 
the poor, and that particular allowances will be made 
for the rich because they are born into such disad- 
vantages, and with their wickednesses and their mis- 
eries, their love of spiritual dirt and meanness, subserve 
the highest growth and emancipation of the poor, that 
they may inherit both the earth and the kingdom of 
heaven. 



RICH AND POOR. 69 

LXIX. 

God has such patience in working us into vessels of 
honor ! in teaching us to be children. And shall we 
find the human heart, in which the germs of all that is 
noblest and loveliest and likest to God have begun to 
grow and manifest themselves, uninteresting, because 
its circumstances have been narrow, bare, and poverty- 
stricken, though neither sordid nor unclean ? 

LXX. 

How can a man serve riches ? Why, when he says 
to riches, "Ye are my good." When he feels he can- 
not be happy without them. When he puts forth the 
energies of his nature to get them. When he schemes, 
and dreams, and lies awake about them. When he 
will not give to his neighbor for fear of becoming poor 
himself. When he wants to have more, and to know 
he has more, than he can need. When he wants to 
leave money behind him, not for the sake of his chil- 
dren or relatives, but for the name of the wealth. 
When he leaves his money, not to those who need it, 
even of his relations, but to those who are rich like 
himself, making them yet more of slaves to the over- 
grown monster they worship for his size. When he 
honors those who have money because they have 



7o CHEERFUL WORDS. 

money, irrespective of their character ; or when he 
honors in a rich man what he would not honor in a 
poor man. Then is he the slave of mammon. Still 
more is he mammon's slave when his devotion to his 
god makes him oppressive to those over whom his 
wealth gives him power ; or when he becomes unjust 
in order to add to his stores. How will it be with such 
a man, when on a sudden he finds that the world has 
vanished, and he is alone with God ? There lies the 
body in which he used to live, whose poor necessities 
first made money of value to him, but with which itself 
and its fictitious value are both left behind. He cannot 
now even try to bribe God with a check. The angels 
will not bow down to him because his property, as set 
forth in his will, takes five or six figures to express its 
amount. It makes no difference to them that he has 
lost it, though ; for they never respected him. And 
the poor souls of Hades, who envied him the wealth 
they had lost before, rise up as one man to welcome 
him, not for love of him — no worshipper of mammon 
loves another — but rejoicing in the mischief that has 
befallen him, and saying, " Art thou also become one 
of us ? " And Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, however 
sorry he may be for him, however grateful he may feel 
to him for the broken victuals and the penny, cannot 
with one drop of the water of paradise cool that man's 
parched tongue. 



RICH AND POOR. 71 

LXXI. 

But for money and the need of it, there would not be 
half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for 
good when divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it 
is sweet as the hawthorn ; shut it up, and it cankers 
and breeds worms. Like all the best gifts of God, like 
the air and the water, it must have motion and change 
and shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the 
heart and mind of man, it must be broken and turned, 
not heaped together and neglected. It is an angel of 
mercy, whose wings are full of balm and dews and re- 
freshings ; but when you lay hold of him, pluck his 
pinions, pen him in a yard, and fall down and worship 
him — then, with the blessed vengeance of his master, 
he deals plague and confusion and terror to stay the 
idolatry. If I misuse, or waste, or hoard the divine 
thing, I pray my Master to see to it, my God to punish 
me. Any fire rather than be given over to the mean 
idol. 

LXXII. 

" Friend, be not a slave. Be wary. Look not on 
the gold when it is yellow in thy purse. Hoard not. 
In God's name, spend — spend on. Take heed how 
thou spendest, but take heed that thou spend. Be thou 
as the sun in heaven ; let thy gold be thy rays, thy' 
angels of love and life and deliverance. Be thou a 



72 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

candle of the Lord, to spread His light through the 
world. If hitherto, in any fashion of faithlessness, thou 
hast radiated darkness into the universe, humble thy- 
self, and arise and shine. 

" But if thou art poor, then look not on thy purse 
when it is empty. He who desires more than God wills 
him to have, he also is a servant of mammon, for he 
trusts in what God has made, and not in God himself. 
He who laments what God has taken from him, he is a 
servant of mammon. He who for care cannot pray, is 
a servant of mammon." 

LXXIII. 

If a man talks of the main chance, meaning thereby 
that of making money, or of number one, meaning self 
thereby, except indeed he honestly jest, he is a servant 
of mammon. If, when thou makest a bargain, thou 
thinkest only of thyself and thy gain, thou art a servant 
of mammon. The eager looks of those that would get 
money, the troubled looks of those that have lost it, 
worst of all, the gloating looks of them that have it — 
these are sure signs of the service of mammon. If in 
the church thou sayest to the rich man, " Sit here in a 
good place," and to the poor man, " Stand there," thou 
art a mammon-server. If thou favorest the company 
of those whom men call well-to-do, when they are only 
well-to-eat, or well-to-drink, or well-to-show, and de- 



RICH AND POOR. 73 

clinest that of the simple and the meek, then in thy 
deepest consciousness know that thou servest mammon 
and not God. If thy hope of well-being in time to 
come rests upon thy houses, or lands, or business, or 
money in store, and not upon the living God, be thou 
friendly and kind with the overflowings of thy posses- 
sions, or a churl whom no man loves, thou art equally 
a server of mammon. If the loss of thy goods would 
take from thee the joy of thy life ; if it would tear thy 
heart that the men thou hadst feasted should hold forth 
to thee the two fingers instead of the whole hand ; nay, 
if thy thought of to-morrow makes thee quail before the 
duty of to-day, if thou broodest over the evil that is to 
come, and turnest from the God who is with thee in the 
life of the hour, thou servest mammon ; he holds thee 
in his chain ; thou art his ape, whom he leads about the 
world for the mockery of his fellow-devils. If with thy 
word, yea, even with thy judgment, thou confessest that 
God is the only good, yet livest as if He had sent thee 
into the world to make thyself rich before thou die ; if 
it will add one feeblest pang to the pains of thy death, 
to think that thou must leave thy fair house, thy ances- 
tral trees, thy horses, thy shop, thy books, behind thee, 
then art thou a servant of mammon, and far truer to 
thy master than he will prove to thee. Ah, slave ! the 
moment the breath is out of thy body, lo, he has already 
deserted thee ! and of all in which thou didst rejoice, 
all that gave thee such power over thy fellows, there is 



74 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

not left so much as a spike of thistle-down for the wind 
to waft from thy sight. For all thou hast had, there is 
nothing to show. Where is the friendship in which 
thou mightst have invested thy money, in place of bury- 
ing it in the maw of mammon ? Troops of the dead 
might now be coming to greet thee with love and ser- 
vice, hadst thou made thee friends with thy money ; 
but, alas ! to thee it was not money, but mammon, for 
thou didst love it — not for the righteousness and sal- 
vation thou by its means mightst work in the earth, but 
for the honor it brought thee among men, for the pleas- 
ures and immunities it purchased. 

LXXIV. 

I knew a rich lady once, in giving a large gift of 
money to a poor man, say apologetically, " I hope it 
is no disgrace in me to be rich, as it is none in you to 
be poor." It is not the being rich that is wrong, but 
the serving of riches, instead of making them serve 
your neighbor and yourself — your neighbor for this 
life, yourself for the everlasting habitations. God 
knows it is hard for the rich man to enter into the 
kingdom of heaven ; but the rich man does sometimes 
enter in ; for God hath made it possible. And the 
greater the victory, when it is the rich man that over- 
cometh the world. It is easier for the poor man to 
enter into the kingdom, yet many of the poor have 



RICH AND POOR. 75 

failed to enter in, and the greater is the disgrace of 
their defeat. For as the poor have more done for 
them, as far as outward things go, in the way of salva- 
tion, than the rich, and have a beatitude all to them- 
selves besides. 

LXXV. 

The opinion of no man who does not render back his 
soul to the living God, and live in Him, is, in religion, 
worth the splinter of a straw. Friends, cast your idol 
into the furnace ; melt your mammon down, coin him 
up, make God's money of him, and send him coursing. 
Make of him cups to carry the gift of God, the water 
of life, through the world — in lovely justice to the 
oppressed, in healthful labor to them whom no man 
hath hired, in rest to the weary who have borne the 
burden and heat of the day, in joy to the heavy- 
hearted, in laughter to the dull-spirited. Let them all 
be glad with reason, and merry without revel. Ah ! 
what gifts in music, in the drama, in the tale, in the 
picture, in the spectacle, in books and models, in 
flowers and friendly feasting, what true gifts might not 
the mammon of unrighteousness, changed back into 
the money of God, give to men and women, bone of 
our bone, and flesh of our flesh ! How would you not 
spend your money for the Lord, if he needed it at your 
hand ! He does need it ; for he that spends it upon 
the least of his fellows, spends it upon his Lord. To 



76 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

hold fast upon God with one hand, and open wide the 
other to your neighbor — that is religion; that is the 
law and prophets, and the true way to all better things 
that are yet to come. 

LXXVI. 

Perhaps the highest moral height which a man can 
reach, and at the same time the most difficult of 
attainment, is the willingness to be nothing relatively, 
so that he attain that positive excellence which the 
original conditions of his being render not merely 
possible, but imperative. It is nothing to a man to 
be greater or less than another ; to be esteemed or 
otherwise by the public or private world in which he 
moves. Does he, or does he not, behold and love 
and live the unchangeable, the essential, the divine. 
This he can only do according as God has made him. 
He can behold and understand God in the least 
degree, as well as in the greatest, only by the God- 
like within him • and he that loves thus the good and 
great has no room, no thought, no necessity, for com- 
parison and difference. The truth satisfies him. He 
lives in his absoluteness. God makes the glow-worm, 
as well as the star ; the light in both is divine. If 
mine be an earth-star to gladden the wayside, I must 
cultivate humbly and rejoicingly its green earth-glow, 
and not seek to blanch it to the whiteness of the 



HUMILITY. 77 

stars that lie in the fields of blue. For to deny God 
in my own being, is to cease to behold Him in any. 
God and man can meet only by the man becoming 
that which God meant him to be. Then he enters 
into the house of life, which is greater than the house 
of fame. It is better to be a child in a green field 
than a knight of many orders in a state ceremonial. 

LXXVII. 

It is not great battles alone that build up the 
world's history, nor great poems alone that make the 
generations grow. There is a still, small rain from 
heaven, that has more to do with the blessedness 
of nature, and of human nature, than the mightiest 
earthquake, or the loveliest rainbow. 

LXXVIII. 

As I came near, I smelt what has been to me always 
a delightful smell — that of fresh deals under the hands 
of the carpenter. In the scent of those boards of pine 
is inclosed all the idea the tree could gather of the world 
of forest where it was reared. It speaks of many wild 
and bright but chiefly clean and rather cold things. If 
I were idling, it would draw me to it across many fields. 
Turning a corner, I heard the sound of a saw. And this 
sound drew me yet more. For a carpenter's shop was 



78 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

the delight of my boyhood ; and after I began to read 
the history of our Lord with something of that sense of 
reality with which we read other histories, and which, 
I am sorry to think, so much of the well-meant instruc- 
tion we receive in our youth tends to destroy, my feel- 
ing about such a work-shop grew stronger and stronger, 
till at last I never could go near enough to see the 
shavings lying, on the floor of one without a spiritual 
sensation such as I have in entering an old church ; 
which sensation, ever since having been admitted on 
the usual conditions to a Mohammedan mosque, urges 
me to pull off, not only my hat, but my shoes likewise. 
And the feeling has grown upon me, till now it seems at 
times as the only cure in the world for social pride would 
be to go for five silent minutes into a carpenter's shop. 
How one can think of himself as above his neighbors, 
within sight, sound, or smell of one, I fear I am getting 
almost unable to imagine. 

LXXIX. 

If we could once leave it to each other to give what 
honor is due ; knowing that honor demanded is as worth- 
less as insult undeserved is hurtless ! What has one to 
do to honor himself ? That is and can be no honor. 
When one has learned to seek the honor that cometh 
from God only, he will take the withholding of the honor 
that comes from men very quietly indeed. 



HUMILITY. 79 

LXXX. 

The history of the kingdom of heaven — need I say 
I mean a very different thing from what is called 
church-history ? — is the only history that will ever be 
able to show itself a history — that can ever come to 
be thoroughly written, or to be read with a clear un- 
derstanding : for it alone will prove able to explain 
itself, while in doing so it wilT explain all other at- 
tempted histories as well. Many of those who will 
then be found first in the eternal record may have 
been of little regard in the eyes of even their religious 
contemporaries, may have been absolutely unknown 
to the generations that came after, and were yet the 
men of life and potency, working as light, as salt, as 
leaven, in the world. When the real worth of things 
is, over all, the measure of their estimation, then is 
the kingdom of our God and His Christ. 

LXXXI. 

" ■ My strength is made perfect in weakness,' " said 
Ruth, solemnly, heedless of the depreciation. 

" I think I like the older reading better — that is, 
without the my" said Polwarth : " ' Strength is made 
perfect in weakness.' Somehow — I cannot explain 
the feeling — to hear a grand aphorism spoken in 
widest application, as a fact of more than humanity, 



80 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of all creation, from the mouth of the human God, 
the living Wisdom, seems to bring me close to the 
very heart of the universe. Strength — strength it- 
self — all over — is made perfect in weakness: a law 
of being, you see, Ruth ! not a law of Christian 
growth only, but a law of growth, even all the growth 
leading up to the Christian, which growth is the high- 
est kind of creation. The Master's own strength was 
thus perfected, and so must be that of His brothers 
and sisters. Ah, what a strength must be His ! — how 
patient in endurance — how gentle in exercise — how 
mighty in devotion — how fine in its issues, perfected 
by such suffering ! Ah, my child, you suffer sorely, 
sometimes — I know it well ! but shall we not let 
patience have her perfect work, that we may — one 
day, Ruth, one day, my child — be perfect and entire, 
wanting nothing ? " 

LXXXII. 

Brothers, sisters, all good men and true women, let 
the Master seat us where He will. Until He says, 
"Come up higher," let us sit at the foot of the board, 
or stand behind, honored in waiting upon His guests. 
All that kind of thing is worth nothing in the king- 
dom ; and nothing will be remembered of us but the 
Master's judgment. 



TRUTH. Z\ 

LXXXIII 

" Do you not profess to have, and hold, and therefore 
teach, the truth ? " 

" I profess only to have caught glimpses of her white 
garments — those, I mean, of the abstract truth of 
which you speak. But I have seen that which is eter- 
nally beyond her: the ideal in the real, the living 
truth ; not the truth that I can think, but the truth that 
thinks itself, that thinks me, that God has thought, yea, 
that God is, the truth being true to itself, and to God, 
and to man — Christ Jesus, my Lord, who knows, and 
feels, and does the truth. I have seen Him, and I am 
both content and unsatisfied. For in Him are hid all 
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 

LXXXIV. 

If there be truth, that truth must be itself — must 
exercise its own blessing nature upon the soul which 
receives it in loyal understanding — that is, in obedi- 
ence. A man may accept no end of things as facts 
which are not facts, and his mistakes will not hurt him. 
He may be unable to receive many facts as facts, and 
neither they nor his refusal of them will hurt. He may 
not a whit the less be living in and by the truth. He 
may be quite unable to answer the doubts of another, 
but if, in the progress of his life, those doubts should 



82 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

present themselves to his own soul, then will he be able 
to meet them ; he is in the region where all true answers 
are gathered. He may be unable to receive this or 
that embodiment or form of truth, not having yet 
grown to its level, but it is no matter so long as when 
he sees a truth he does it ; to see and not do would at 
once place him in eternal danger. Hence, a man of 
ordinary intellect and little imagination may yet be so 
radiant in nobility as, to the true poet heart, to be 
right worshipful. There is in the man who does the 
truth, the radiance of life essential, eternal — a glory 
infinitely beyond any that can belong to the intellect, 
beyond any that can ever come within its scope to be 
judged, proven, or denied by it. Through experiences 
doubtful even to the soul in which they pass, the life 
they may yet be flowing in. To know God is to be in 
the secret place of all knowledge ; and to trust Him 
changes the atmosphere surrounding mystery and seem- 
ing contradiction, from one of pain and fear to one of 
hope ; the unknown may be some lovely truth in store 
for us, which yet we are not good enough to apprehend. 
A man may dream all night that he is awake, and, 
when he does wake, be none the less sure that he is 
awake, in that he thought so all the night when he was 
not ; but he will find himself no more able to prove it 
than he would have been then, only able to talk better 
about it. The differing consciousnesses of the two 
conditions cannot he produced in evidence, or embodied 



TRUTH. 83 

in forms of the understanding. But my main point is 
this, that not to be intellectually certain of a truth does' 
not prevent the heart that loves and obeys that truth 
from getting its truth-good, from drawing life from its 
holy factness, present in the love of it. 

LXXXV. 

When we rise into the mountain air, we require no 
other testimony than that of our lungs that we are in a 
healthful atmosphere. We do not find it necessary to 
submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content 
that we breathe with joy, that we grow in strength, be- 
come lighter-hearted and better-tempered. Truth is a 
very different thing from fact ; it is the loving contact 
of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does 
its work in the soul independently of all faculty or 
qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. 
Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. 
It were as poor a matter as any held by those who 
deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended 
upon any buttressing of other and jpwer material. 

How should it be otherwise ? If God be so near as 
the very idea of Him necessitates, what other availing 
proof of His existence can there be, than such aivareness 
as must come of the developing relation between Him 
and us ? The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if 
such were to be had, would be of no value. God would 



84 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

be no nearer us for them all. They would bring about 
no blossoming of the mighty fact. While He was in 
our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us 
a gulf of misery, of no knowledge. 

Peace is for those who do the truth, not those who 
opine it. The true man troubled by intellectual doubt 
is so troubled unto further health and growth. Let 
him be alive and hopeful, above all, obedient, and he 
will be able to wait for the deeper content which must 
follow with completer insight. Men may say such a 
man but deceives himself, that there is nothing of the 
kind he pleases himself with imagining ; but this is at 
least worth reflecting upon — that while the man who 
aspires fears he may be deceiving himself, it is the man 
who does not aspire who asserts that he is. One day 
the former may be sure, and the latter may cease to 
deny, and begin to doubt ! 

LXXXVI. 

Any recognition of truth, whatever form it may take, 
whether that of pontic delight, intellectual corrobora- 
tion, practical commonplace, or even vulgar aphorism, 
must be welcomed by the husbandmen of the God of 
growth. A response which jars against the popular 
pitch of our mental instrument, must not therefore be 
turned away from with dislike. Our mood of the 
moment is not that by which the universe is tuned into 



TRUTH. 85 

its harmonies. We must drop our instrument and listen 
to the other, and if we find that the player upon it is 
breathing after a higher expression, is, after his fashion, 
striving to embody something he sees of the same truth, 
the utterance of which called forth this his answer, let 
us thank God and take courage. God at least is 
pleased : and if our refinement and education take 
away from our pleasure, it is because of something low, 
false, and selfish \ not divine, in a word, that is min- 
gled with that refinement and that education. 

LXXXVII. 

Nothing can be known except what is true. A nega- 
tive may be fact, but cannot be known except by the 
knowledge of its opposite. I believe also that nothing 
can be really believed, except it be true. But people 
think they believe many things which they do not and 
cannot in the real sense believe. 

When, however, Dorothy came to concern herself 
about the will of God, in trying to help her father to do 
the best with their money, she began to reap a little 
genuine comfort, for then she found things begin to ex- 
plain themselves a little. The more a man occupies 
himself in doing the works of the Father — the sort of 
thing the Father does — the easier will he find it to 
believe that such a Fathei is at work in the world. 



86 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

LXXXVIII. 

People talk about special providences. I believe in 
the providences, but not in the specialty. I do not 
believe that God lets the thread of my affairs go for six 
days, and on the seventh evening takes it up for a 
moment. The so-called special providences are no ex- 
ception to the rule — they are common to all men at all 
moments. But it is a fact that God's care is more 
evident in some instances of it than others to the dim 
and often bewildered vision of humanity. Upon such 
instances men seize and call them providences. It is 
well that they can ; but it would be gloriously better if 
they could believe that the whole matter is one grand 
providence. 

LXXXIX. 

All the time I was speaking, the rain, mingled with 
sleet, was dashing against the windows, and the wind 
was howling over the graves all about. But the dead 
were not troubled by the storm ; and over my head, 
from beam to beam of the roof, now resting on one, 
now flitting to another, a sparrow kept flying, which 
had taken refuge in the church till the storm should 
cease, and the sun shine out in the great temple. 
"This," I said aloud, "is what the church is for; as 
the sparrow finds there a house from the storm, so the 
human heart escapes thither to hear the still small 



SPECIAL PROVIDENCES. 87 

voice of God when its faith is too weak to find Him in 
the storm, and in the sorrow, and in the pain." And 
while I spoke, a dim watery gleam fell on the chancel 
floor, and the comfort of the sun awoke in my heart. 
Nor let any one call me superstitious for taking that 
pale sun-ray of hope as sent to me ; for I received it as 
comfort for the race, and for me as one of the family, 
even as the bow that was set in the cloud, a promise to 
the eyes of light for them that sit in darkness. As I 
write, my eye falls upon the Bible on the table by my 
side, and I read the words, " For the Lord God is a sun 
and shield, the Lord will give grace and glory." And I 
lift my eyes from my paper and look abroad from my 
window, and the sun is shining in its strength. The 
leaves are dancing in the light wind that gives them 
each its share of the sun, and my trouble has passed 
away forever, like the storm of that night, and the un- 
rest of that strange Sabbath. 

Such comforts would come to us oftener from nature, 
if we really believed that our God was the God of 
nature ; that when He made, or rather when He makes, 
He means, that not His hands only, but His heart, 
too, is in the making of those things ; that, therefore, 
the influences of nature upon human minds and hearts 
are because He intended them. And if we believe 
that our God is everywhere, why should we not think 
Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes 



88 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

seem so strange ? For if He be in the things that coin- 
cide, He must be in the coincidence of those things. 



XC. 



If people were both observant and memorious, they 
would cease, I fancy, to be astonished at coincidences. 
Rightly regarded, the universe is but one coincidence — 
only where will has to be developed, there is need for 
human play, and room for that in its spaces must be 
provided. The works of God being from the begin- 
ning, and all his beginnings invisible either from great- 
ness or smallness, or nearness or remoteness, number- 
less coincidences may pass in every man's history 
before he becomes capable of knowing either the need 
or good of them ; he has only enjoyed their results. 

XCI. 

One of the highest benefits we can reap from under- 
standing the way of God with ourselves is, that we 
become able thus to trust Him for others with whom 
we do not understand His ways. 

XCII. 

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty 
will make any one conceited who only does it some- 



DUTY. 89 

times. Those who do it always would as soon think of 
being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their 
duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not 
picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform 
would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a 
sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees 
what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any 
but a low creature be conceited of not being contempt- 
ible ? Until our duty becomes to us as common as 
breathing, we are poor creatures. 

XCIII. 

What God may hereafter require of you, you must 
not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything 
He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you 
can, and that is the best possible preparation for what 
He may want you to do next. If people would but do 
what they have to do, they would always find them- 
selves ready for what came next. And I do not believe 
that those who follow this rule are ever left floundering 
on the sea-deserted sands of inaction, unable to find 
water enough to swim in. 

XCIV. 

The morning, as it drew slowly on, was a strange 
contrast, in its gray and saffron, to the gorgeous sunset 



90 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of the night before. The sea crept up on the land as 
if it were weary, and did not care much to flow any 
more. Not a breath of wind was in motion, and yet 
the air even on the shore seemed full of the presence 
of decaying leaves and damp earth. 

Malcolm sat down in the mouth of the cave, and 
looked out on the still, half-waking world of ocean and 
sky before him — a leaden ocean, and a dull, misty 
sky ; and as he gazed, a sadness came stealing over 
him, and a sense of the endlessness of labor — labor 
ever returning on itself and making no progress. 
What was the much good of life ? Where was the end 
of it all ? People so seldom got what they desired ! If 
all the world were happy but one man, that one's 
misery would be as a cairn "on which the countless mul- 
titudes of the blessed must heap the stones of endless 
questions and enduring perplexities. 

Unseen from where he sat, the sun drew nearer the 
horizon ; the light grew ; the tide began to ripple up 
more diligently ; a glimmer of dawn touched even the 
brown rock in the farthest end of the cave. 

Where there was light, there was work, and where 
there was work for any one, there was at least justifica- 
tion of his existence. That work must be done, if it 
should return and return in a never broken circle. Its 
theory could wait. For indeed the only hope of finding 
the theory of all theories, the divine idea, lay in the 
going on of things. 



DUTY. 91 

XCV. 

The man who will not do a thing for duty, will never 
get so far as to derive any help from the hope of good- 
ness. Duty itself is only a stage towards something 
better. It is but the impulse, God-given, I believe, 
towards a far more vital contact with the truth. We 
shall one day forget all about duty, and do everything 
from the love of the loveliness of it, the satisfaction of 
the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who 
ministered to the wants of his wife and family only 
from duty ? Of course you wish heartily that the man 
who neglects them would do it from any cause, even 
were it fear of the whip ; but the strongest and most 
operative sense of duty would not satisfy you in such a 
relation. There are depths within depths of righteous- 
ness. Duty is the only path to freedom, but that free- 
dom is the love that is beyond and anticipates duty. 

The thing that God loves is the only lovely thing 
and he who does it, does well, and is upon the way to 
discover that he does it very badly. When he comes 
to do it, as the will of the perfect good, then is he on 
the road to do it perfectly — that is, from love of its 
own inherent self-constituted goodness, born in the 
heart of the perfect. The doing of things from duty is 
but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and 
love. Not the less must the stage be journeyed ; every 



92 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

path diverging from it is " the flowery way that leads to 
the broad gate and the great fire." 

XCVI. 

Hark,, hark, a voice amid the quiet intense! 
It is thy Duty waiting thee without. 
Rise from thy knees in hope, the half of doubt ; 
A hand doth pull thee — it is Providence; 
Open thy door straightway, and get thee hence ; 
Go forth into the tumult and the shout ; 
Work, love, with workers, lovers all about : 
Of noise alone is born the inward sense 
Of silence ; and from action springs alone 
The inward knowledge of true love and faith. 
Then, weary, go thou back with failing breath, 
And in thy chamber make thy prayer and moan ; 
• One day upon His bosom, all thine own, 

Thou shalt lie still embraced in holy death. 

XCVII. 

I cannot count it perfect hospitality to be friendly and 
plentiful towards those whom you have invited to your 
house — what thank has a man in that ? — while you are 
cold and forbidding to those who have not that claim on 
your attention. That is not perfect as our Father in 
heaven is perfect. By all means tell people, when you 
are busy about something that must be done, that you 
cannot spare the time for them except they want you 



SINCERITY. 93 

upon something of yet more pressing necessity ; but tell 
them, and do not get rid of them by the use of the in- 
strument commonly called the cold shoulder. It is a 
wicked instrument that, and ought to have fallen out of 
use by this time. 

XCVIII. 

See the tendency of man to conceal his treasures, to 
claim even truth as his own by discovery, to hide it 
and be proud of it, gloating over that which he thinks 
he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite 
of God ! We would be forever heaping together pos- 
sessions, dragging things into the cave of our finitude, 
our individual self, not perceiving that the things which 
pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have 
been, are thenceforth "but straws, small sticks, and 
dust of the floor." When a man would have a truth 
in thither as if it were of no private interpretation, he 
drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining out- 
side, has burst and left. 

XCIX. 

Is it not a strange drift of men, to hide what is, unaer 
the veil of what is not ? to seek refuge in lies, as if 
that which is not could be an armor of adamant ? to 
run from the daylight for safety, deeper into the cave ? 
In the cave house the creatures of the night — the 



94 ^~~ CHEERFUL WORDS. 

tigers and hyenas, the serpent and the old dragon of 
the dark ; in the light are true men and women, and 
the clear-eyed angels. But the reason is only too plain ; 
it is, alas ! that they are themselves of the darkness 
and not of light. They do not fear their own. They 
are more comfortable with the beasts of darkness than 
with the angels of light. They dread the peering of 
holy eyes into their hearts ; they feel themselves naked 
and fear to be shamed, therefore cast the garment of 
hypocrisy about them. They have that in them so 
strange to the light that they feel it must be hidden 
from the eye of day, as a thing hideous, that is, a thing 
to be hidden. But the hypocrisy is worse than all it 
would hide. That, they have to hide again, as a more 
hideous thing still. 

God hides nothing. His very work from the begin- 
ning is revelation — a casting aside of veil after veil, a 
showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on, 
from fact to fact divine He advances, until at length in 
His Son, Jesus, He unveils His very face. Then be- 
gins a fresh unveiling, for the very work of the Father 
is the work the Son Himself has to do — self, and the 
unveiling of the Son, is still going on, and is that for 
the sake of which the world exists. When He is un- 
veiled — that is, when we know the Son — we shall 
know the Father also. The whole of creation, its 
growth, its history, the gathering total of human exis- 
tence, is an unveiling of the Father. He is the life, the 



SINCERITY 95 

eternal life, the Only. I see it — ah ! believe me — I 
see it as I cannot say it. From month to month it 
grows upon me. The lovely home-light, the one essence 
of peaceful being, is God Himself. 

He loves light and not darkness, therefore shines, 
therefore reveals. True, there are infinite gulfs in Him, 
into which our small vision cannot pierce ; but they are 
gulfs of light, and the truths there are invisible only 
through excess of their own clarity. There is a dark- 
ness that comes of effulgence, and the most veiling of 
all veils is the light. That for which the eye exists is 
light, but through light no human eye can pierce. I 
find myself beyond my depth. I am ever beyond my 
depth, afloat in an infinite sea ; but the depth of the sea 
knows me, for the ocean of my being is God. What I 
would say is this : that the light is not blinding because 
God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious 
for our vision. The effulgence of Himself, God veiled 
that He might unveil it — in His Son. Inter-universal 
spaces, aeons, eternities — what word of vastness you 
can find or choose — take unfathomable darkness itself, 
if you will, to express the infinitude of God, that orig- 
inal splendor existing only to the consciousness of God 
Himself — I say He hides" it not, but is revealing it 
ever, forever, at all cost of labor, yea, of pain to Him- 
self. His whole creation is a sacrificing of Himself to 
the being and well-being of His little ones, that, being 
wrought out at last into partakers of His divine nature, 



96 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest 
bliss. He brings hidden things out of the light of His 
own being into the light of ours. 



C. 



The next day, the day of the resurrection, rose 
glorious from its sepulchre of sea-fog and drizzle. It 
had poured all night long, but at sunrise the clouds had 
broken and scattered, and the air was the purer for the 
cleansing rain, while the earth shone with that peculiar 
lustre which follows the weeping which has endured its 
appointed night. The larks were at it again, singing 
as if their hearts would break for joy, as they hovered 
in brooding exultation over the song of the future ; for 
their nests beneath hoarded a wealth of larks for sum- 
mers to come. 

The inward hush of the resurrection, broken only by 
the prophetic birds, the poets of the groaning and 
travailing creation, held time and space as in a trance ; 
and the centre from which radiated both the hush and 
the carolling expectation seemed to Alexander Graham 
to be the churchyard in which he was now walking in 
the cool of the morning. It was more carefully kept 
than most Scottish churchyards, and yet was not too 
trim. Nature had a word in the affair — was allowed 
her part of mourning, in long grass and moss, and the 
crumbling away of stone. The wholesomeness of decay 



DEA TH. 97 

which both in nature and humanity is but the miry road 
back to life, was not unrecognized here ; there was 
nothing of the hideous attempt to hide death in the 
garments of life. The master walked about gently, 
now stopping to read some well-known inscription, and 
ponder for a moment over the words ; and now wander- 
ing across the stoneless mounds content to be forgotten 
by all but those who loved the departed. At length he 
seated himself on a slab by the side of the mound that 
rose but yesterday; it was sculptured with symbols of 
decay — needless, surely, where the originals lay about 
the mouth of every newly-opened grave, and as surely 
ill-befitting the precincts of a church whose indwelling 
gospel is of life victorious over death. 

"What are these stones," he said to himself, "but 
monuments to oblivion ? They are not memorials of 
the dead, but memorials of the forgetfulness of the 
living. How vain it is to send a poor forsaken name, 
like the title page of a lost book, down the careless 
stream of time ! Let me serve my generation, and let 
God remember me ! " 

CI. 

Many a life has been injured by the constant expec- 
tation of death. It is life we have to do with, not 
death. The best preparation for the night is to work 
while the day lasts, diligently. The best preparation 
for death is life. 



98 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CII. 

Life is gladness ; it is the death in it that makes the 
misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the mis- 
take. If gladness were not at the root, whence its 
opposite sorrow against which we arise, from which we 
recoil, with which we fight ? We recognize it as death 
— the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but 
for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that 
fights must be life. It is of the nature of light, not of 
darkness. Darkness is nothing until the light comes. 
The very child-play of nature is her assertion of the 
secret that life is the deepest — that life shall conquer 
death ; those who believe this must bear the good news 
to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. 
Our Lord has conquered death — yea, the moral death 
that He called the world — and now having sown the 
seed of light, the harvest is springing in human hearts, 
and will grow and grow until the hearts of the children 
of the kingdom shall rejoice in the sunlight of the 
Father's presence. 

cm. 

" In nothing," said the curate, " do we show less 
faith than the way in which we think and speak about 
death. ' O Death, where is thy sting ? O Grave, where 
is thy victory ? ' says the apostle. ' Here, here, here,' 
cry the Christian people, ' everywhere ! It is an awful 



DEA TH. 



99 



sting, a fearful victory. But God keeps it away from 
us many a time when we ask Him — to let it pierce us 
to the heart at last, to be sure ; but that can't be 
helped.' I mean this is how they feel in their hearts 
who do not believe that God is as merciful when He 
sends death as when He sends life ; who, Christian 
people as they are, yet look upon death as an evil 
thing which cannot be avoided, and would, if they 
might live always, be content to live always. Death or 
life — each is God's ; for He is not the God of the 
dead, but of the living ; there are no dead, for all live 
to Him." 

"But don't you think we naturally shrink from 
death ? " 

" There can be doubt about that." 

" Then, if it be natural, God must have meant that it 
should be so." 

" Doubtless, to begin with ; but not to continue or 
end with. A child's sole desire is for food — the 
very best possible to begin with. But how would it be 
if the child should reach, say, two years of age, and 
refuse to share the same with his little brother ? Or 
what comes of the man who never so far rises above 
the desire for food, that nothing could make him forget 
his dinner-hour ? Just so the life of Christians should 
be strong enough to overcome the fear of death. We 
ought to love and believe our Saviour so much that 
when He says we shall not die, we should at least be- 



ioo CHEERFUL WORDS. 

lieve that death must be very different from what it 
looks to us to be — so different, that what we mean by 
the word does not apply to the reality at all ; and so 
Jesus cannot use the word, because it would not seem 
to us that He meant what we mean by it, which He, 
seeing it all round, cannot mean." 

CIV. 

While the curate was preaching in the cool cavernous 
church, with its great lights overhead, Walter Drake, 
the old minister, as he was now called by his disloyal 
congregation — sat in a little arbor looking out on the 
river that flowed through the town to the sea. Green 
grass went down from where he sat to the very water's 
brink. It was a spot the old man loved, for there his 
best thoughts came to him. There was in him a good 
deal of the stuff of which poets are made, and since 
trouble overtook him, the river had more and more 
gathered to itself the aspect of that in the " Pilgrim's 
Progress ; " and often, as he sat thus almost on its edge, 
he fancied himself waiting the welcome summons to go 
home. It was a tidal river, with many changes. Now 
it flowed with a full, calm current, conquering the tide, 
like life sweeping death with it down into the bosom of 
the eternal. Now it seemed to stand still, as if aghast 
at the inroad of the awful thing ; and then the minister 
would bethink himself that it was the tide of the eter- 



DEATH. i or 

nal rising in the narrow earthly channel : men, he said 
to himself, called it death, because they did not know 
what it was, or the loveliness of its quickening energy. 
It fails on their sense by the might of its grand excess, 
and they call it by the name of its opposite. A weary 
and rather disappointed pilgrim, he thus comforted him- 
self as he sat. 

CV. 

" To think," I said to myself, as I walked over the 
bridge to the village street — " to think that the one 
moment the person is here, and the next — who shall 
say where ? for we know nothing of the region beyond 
the grave ! Not even our risen Lord thought fit to bring 
back from hades any news for the human family stand- 
ing straining their eyes after their brothers and sisters 
that have vanished in the dark. Surely it is well, all 
well, although we know nothing, save that our Lord has 
been there, knows all about it, and does not choose to 
tell us. Welcome ignorance, then ! the ignorance in 
which He chooses to leave us. I would rather not 
know, if He gave me my choice, but preferred that I 
should not know." 

CVI. 

He went slowly through the churchyard, breathing 
deep breaths of the delicious spring-morning air. 



ro2 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Raindrops were sparkling all over the grassy graves, 
and in the hollows of the stones they had gathered in 
pools. The eyes of the death-heads were full of water, 
as if weeping at the defeat of their master. Every now 
and then a soft little wind awoke, like a throb of the 
spirit of life, and shook together the scattered drops 
upon the trees, and then down came diamond showers 
on the grass and daisies of the mounds, and fed the 
green moss in the letters of the epitaphs. Over all the 
sun was shining, as if everywhere and forever spring 
was the order of things. And is it not so ? Is not the 
idea of the creation an eternal spring ever trembling on 
the verge of summer ? It seemed so to the curate, who 
was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing 
over the graves. From such moods his heart recoiled. 
To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they 
would have been treacherous. No grave was to him 
the place where a friend was lying ; it was but a cen- 
otaph — the place where the Lord had lain. 

" Let those possessed with demons haunt the tombs," 
he said, as he sat down in the pulpit ; " for me, I will 
turn my back upon them with the risen" Christ ! Yes, 
friend, I hear you ! I know what you say ! You have 
more affection than I ? you cannot forsake the last rest 
ing-place of the beloved ? Well, you may have more 
.feeling than I ; there is no gauge by which I can tell, 
and if there were it would be useless : we are as God 



DEA TH. 103 

made us. No, I will not say that; I will say rather, 
I am as God is making me, and I shall one day be as 
He has made me. Meantime I know that He will have 
me love my enemy tenfold more than now I love my 
friend. Thou believest that the malefactor — ah, there 
was faith now ! Of two men dying together in agony 
and shame, the one beseeches of the other the grace 
of a king ! Thou believest, I say — at least thou pro- 
fessest to believe, that the malefactor was that very 
day with Jesus in paradise, and yet thou broodest 
over thy friend's grave, gathering thy thoughts about 
the pitiful garment he left behind him, and letting 
himself drift away into the unknown, forsaken of all 
by thy vaguest, most shapeless thinkings ! Tell me not 
thou fearest to enter there whence has issued no re- 
vealing. It is God who gives thee thy mirror of imagi- 
nation, and if thou keep it clean, it will give thee back 
no shadow but of the truth. Never a cry of love went 
forth from human heart but it found some heavenly 
chord to fold it in. Be sure thy friend inhabits a day 
not out of harmony with this morning of earthly spring, 
with this sunlight, those raindrops, that sweet wind 
that flows so softly over his grave." 

evn. 

The world is full of resurrections. Every night that 
folds us up in darkness, is a death ; and those of you 



io4 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

that have been out early, and have seen the first of the 
dawn, will know it — the day rises out of the night 
like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into 
life. But it is yet more of a resurrection to you. 
Think of your own condition through the night and 
in the morning. You die, as it were, every night. The 
death of darkness comes down over the earth ; but a 
deeper death, the death of sleep, descends on you. 
A power overshadows you ; your eyelids close, you 
cannot keep them open if you would ; your limbs lie 
moveless ; the day is gone ; your whole life is gone ; 
you have forgotten everything; an evil man might 
come and do with your goods as he pleased ; you are 
helpless. But the God of the resurrection is awake 
all the time watching His sleeping men and women, 
even as a mother who watches her sleeping babes, only 
with larger eyes and more full of love than hers ; and 
so, you know not how, all at once you know that you 
are what you are ; that there is a world that wants you, 
outside of you ; and a God that wants you inside of 
you ; you rise from the death of sleep, not by your 
own power, for you knew nothing about it; God put 
His hand over your eyes, and you were dead; He 
lifted His hand and breathed light on you, and you 
rose from the dead, thanked the God who raised you 
up, and went forth to do your work. From darkness 
to light, from blindness to seeing ; from knowing noth- 



RESURRECTIONS. 105 

ing to looking abroad on the mighty world ; from help- 
less submission to willing obedience — is not this a 
resurrection indeed ? 

CVIII. 

Look at the death that falls upon the world in 
winter. And look how it revives when the sun draws 
near enough in the spring to wile the life in it once 
more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snow- 
drops come up with their bowed heads, as if full of 
the memory of the fierce winds they encountered last 
spring, and yet ready in the strength of their weak- 
ness to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, 
bringing its gold safe from the dark of its colorless 
grave into the light of its parent gold. Primroses and 
anemones, and bluebells, and a thousand other chil- 
dren of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of 
the wind from the West and South, obey, and leave 
their graves behind to breathe the air of the sweet 
heavens. Up and up they come, till the year is glo- 
rious with the rose and the lily, till the trees are not 
only clothed upon with new garments of loveliest 
green, but the fruit-tree bringeth forth its fruit, and 
the little children of men are made glad with apples, 
and cherries, and hazle-nuts. The earth laughs out 
in green and gold. The sky shares in the grand res- 
urrection. The garments of its mourning: wherewith 



106 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail and 
stormy vapors are swept away, have sunk indeed to 
the earth, and are now humbly feeding the roots of 
the flowers, whose dead stalks they beat upon, all the 
winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the gar- 
ments of praise. Her blue, colored after the sapphire- 
floor, on which stands the throne of Him who is the 
Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and glorified 
with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning 
and evening prayer, puts on colors in which the 
human heart drowns itself with delight — green and 
gold, and purple and rose. Even the icebergs floating 
about in the lonely summer seas of the North, are 
flashing all the glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, 
is not this whole world itself a monument of the 
resurrection. The earth was without form and void. 
The wind of God moved on the face of the waters, 
and up arose this fair world. Darkness was on the 
face of the deep : God said, " Let there be light, and 
there was light." 



CIX. 



Look at the story of the butterfly — so pla'm that 
the pagan Greek called it and the soul by one name 
— Psyche. Look how the creeping thing, ugly to our 
eyes, so that we can hardly handle it without a shud- 
der, finding itself growing sick with age, straightway 



RESURRECTIONS. 107 

falls a spinning and weaving at its own shroud, coffin 
and grave all in one — to prepare, in fact, for its res- 
urrection ; for it is for the sake of the resurrection 
that death exists. Patiently it spins its strength, but 
not its life, away, folds itself up decently, that its body 
may rest in quiet till the new body is formed within 
it ; and at length when the appointed hour has ar- 
rived, out of the body of this crawling thing breaks 
forth the winged splendor of the butterfly — not the 
same body — a new built out of the ruins of the old — 
even as St: Paul tells us that it is not the same body 
we have in the resurrection, but a nobler body like our- 
selves, with all the imperfect and evil thing taken away. 
No more creeping for the butterfly; wings of splen- 
dor, now. Neither yet has it lost the feet wherewith 
to alight on all that is lovely and sweet. Think of 
it — up from the toilsome journey, over the low ground, 
exposed to the foot of every passer-by, destroying the 
lovely leaves upon which it fed, and the fruit which 
they should shelter, up to the path at will through the 
air, and a gathering of food which hurts not the 
source of it — a food which is as but a tribute from 
the loveliness of the flowers to the yet higher loveli- 
ness of the flower-angel — is not this a resurrection? 
Its children, too, shall pass through the same process, 
to wing the air of a summer noon, and rejoice in the 
ethereal and the pure. 



108 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

ex. 

Some say : " How can the same dust be raised again, 
when it may be scattered to the winds of heaven?" 
It is a question I hardly care to answer. The mere 
difficulty can in reason stand for nothing with God ; 
but the apparent worthlessness of the supposition ren- 
ders the question uninteresting to me. What is of 
import is, that I should stand clothed upon with a 
body which is ?ny body, because it serv.es my ends, jus- 
tifies my consciousness of idenity by being, *in all that 
was good in it, like that which I had before, while now 
it is tenfold capable of expressing the thoughts and 
feelings that move within me. How can I care whether 
the atoms that form a certain inch of bone should be 
the same as those which formed that bone when I 
died. All my life-time I never felt or thought of the 
existence of such a bone ! On the other hand I ob- 
ject to having the same worn muscles, the same shriv- 
elled skin with which I happen to die. Why give me 
the same body as that ? Why not rather my youthful 
body, which was strong, and facile and capable ? The 
matter in the muscle of my arm at death would not 
serve to make half the muscle I had when young. 
But I thank God that St. Paul says it will not be the 
same body. That body dies — up springs another 
body. I suspect myself that those are right, who say 
that this body, being the seed, the moment it dies in 



RESURRECTIONS. 109 

the soil of this world, that moment is the resurrection 
of the new body. The life in it, rises out of it, in a 
new body. This is not after it is put in the mere 
earth, for it is dead then and the germ of life gone 
out of it. If a seed rots, no new body comes of it. 
The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. Dy- 
ing and rotting are two very different things — but I 
am not sure by any means. As I say, the whole ques- 
tion is rather uninteresting to me. What do I care 
about my old clothes after I have done with them ? 
What is to me to know what becomes of an old coat, 
or an old pulpit gown ? I have no such clinging to 
the flesh. It seems to me that people believe their 
bodies to be themselves, and are therefore very anx- 
ious about them — and no wonder, then. Enough for 
me that I shall have eyes to see my friends, a face 
that they shall know me by, and a mouth to praise 
God withal. I am well content to rise as Jesus rose, 
however that was. For me the will of God is so good 
that I would rather have His will done than my own 
choice given me. 

CXI. 

If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed, 
waiting for its burial, the soul of the man should begin 
to dawn again, drawing near from afar to look out 
once more at those eyes, to smile once again through 



no CHEERFUL WORDS. 

those lips, the change on that face would be indeed 
great and wondrous, but nothing for marvel or great- 
ness to that which passes on the countenance, the very 
outward bodily face of the man who wakes from his 
sleep, arises from the dead, and receives light from 
Christ. Too often, indeed, the reposeful look on the 
face of the dead body would be troubled, would vanish 
away at the revisiting of the restless ghost ; but when 
a man's own right, true mind, which God made in hkn, 
is restored to him again, and he wakes from the death 
of sin, then comes the repose without the death. It 
may take long for the new spirit to complete the visible 
change, but it begins at once, and will be perfected. 
The bloated look of self-indulgence passes away like 
the leprosy of Naaman, the cheek grows pure, the lips 
return to the smile of hope instead of the grin of greed, 
and the eyes that made innocence shrink and shudder 
with their yellow leer, grow childlike and sweet and 
faithful. The mammon-eyes, hitherto fixed on the 
earth, are lifted to meet their kind ; the lips that mum- 
bled over figures and sums of gold, learn to say words 
of grace and tenderness. The truculent, repellent, 
self-satisfied face begins to look thoughtful and doubt- 
ful, as if searching for some treasure of whose where- 
abouts it had no certain sign. The face anxious, wrin- 
kled, peering, troubled, on whose lines you read the 
dread of hunger, poverty, and nakedness, thaws into a 



Aes URREC TIONS. i 1 1 

smile ; the eyes reflect in courage the light of the 
Father's care ; the back grows erect under its burden, 
with the assurance that the hairs of its head are all 
numbered. But the face can, with all its changes, set 
but dimly forth the rising from the dead which passes 
within. The heart which cared but for itself, becomes 
aware of surrounding thousands like itself, in the love 
and care of which it feels a dawning blessedness un- 
dreamt of before. From selfishness to love — is not 
this a rising from the dead ? 

CXII. 

The man whose ambition declares that his way in the 
world would be to subject everything to his desires, to 
bring every human care, affection, power, and aspira- 
tion to his feet — such a world it would be, and such a 
king it would have, if individual ambition might work 
its will ! if a man's opinion of himself could be made 
out in the world, degrading, compelling, oppressing, 
doing everything for his own glory — and such a glory ! 
but a pang of light strikes this man to the heart ; an 
arrow of truth, feathered with suffering, and loss, and 
dismay, finds out — the open joint in his armor, I was 
going to say — no, finds out the joint in the coffin where 
his heart lies festering in a death so dead that itself 
calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises from the 



U2 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

dead. No more he seeks the slavery of all ; where can 
he find whom to serve ? how can he become if 
but a threshhold in the temple of Christ, where all 
serve all, and no man thinks first of himself ? He to 
whom the mass of his fellows, as he massed them, was 
common and unclean, bows before every human sign of 
the presence of the making God. The sun, which was 
to him but a candle with which to search after his own 
ends, wealth, power, place, praise — the world, which 
was but the cavern where he thus searched — are now 
full of the mystery of loveliness, full of the truth of 
which sun and wind, and land and sea, are symbols and 
signs. From a withered old age of unbelief, the dim 
eyes of which refuse the glory of things a passage to 
the heart, he is raised up a child, full of admiration, 
wonder, and gladness. Everything is glorious to him ; 
he can believe, and therefore he sees. It is from the 
grave into the sunshine, from the night into the morn- 
ing, from death into life. To come out of the ugly into 
the beautiful ; out of the mean and selfish into the 
noble and loving ; out of the paltry into the great ; out 
of the false into the true ; out of the filthy into the 
clean : out of the commonplace into the glorious ; out 
of the corruption of disease into the fine vigor and 
gracious movements of health ; in a word, out of evil 
into good — is not this a resurrection indeed — the 
resurrection of all, the resurrection of life ? 



RESURRECTIONS. 113 

CXIII. 

Every blessed moment in which a man bethinks him- 
self that he has been forgetting his high calling, and 
sends up to the Father a prayer for aid ; every time a 
man resolves that what he has been doing he will do no 
more ; every time that the love of God, or the feeling 
of the truth, rouses a man to look, first up at the light, 
then down at the skirts of his own garments — that 
moment a divine resurrection is wrought in the earth. 
Yea, every time that a man passes from resentment to 
forgiveness, from cruelty to compassion, from hardness 
to tenderness, from indifference to carefulness, from 
selfishness to honesty, from honesty to generosity, from 
generosity to love — a resurrection, the bursting of a 
fresh bud of life out of the grave of evil, gladdens the 
eye of the Father watching His children. 

" Awake, then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the 
dead, and Christ shall give thee light." 

As the harvest rises from the wintry earth, so rise 
thou up from the trials of this world, a full ear in the 
harvest of Him who sowed thee in the soil, that thou 
mightest rise above it. As the summer rises from the 
winter, so rise thou from the cares of eating, and drink- 
ing, and clothing, into the fearless sunshine of con- 
fidence in the Father. As the morning rises out of the 
night, so rise thou from the darkness of ignorance to do 
the will of God in the daylight; and as a man feels 



114 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

that he is himself when he wakes from the troubled and 
grotesque visions of the night into the glory of the sun- 
rise, even so wilt thou feel that when first thou knowest 
what thy life, the gladness of thy being, is. As from 
painful tossing in disease, rise into the health of well- 
being. As. from the awful embrace of thy own dead 
body, burst forth in thy spiritual body. Arise thou, re- 
sponsive to the indwelling will of the Father, even as 
thy body will respond to thy indwelling soul. 

CXIV. 

I thought of the story of the Lord of men, who arose 
by His own might, not alone from the body-tomb, but 
from all the death and despair of humanity, and lifted 
with Him our race, placing their tomb beneath their 
feet, and them in the sunny hope that belongs to them^ 
and for which they were created — the air of their own 
freedom. 

" But," I said to myself, " this is ideal, and belongs 
to the race. Before it comes true for the race, it must 
be done in the individual. If it be true for the race, it 
can only be through its being attainable by the indi- 
vidual. There must be something in the story belong- 
ing to the individual. I will look at the individual 
Christ, and see how He arose." 

• And then I saw that the Lord Himself was clasped 
in the love of the Father ; that it was in the power of 



THE NE W BIR TH. 1 1 5 

mighty communion that the daily obedience was done ; 
that besides the outward story of His devotion to men, ' 
there was the inward story — actually revealed to us 
men, marvellous as that is — the inward story of His 
devotion to His Father ; of His speech to Him ; of 
His upward look ; of His delight in giving up to Him. 
And the answer to His prayers comes out in His 
deeds. 

If, then, He is the captain of our salvation, the head 
of the body of the human church, I must rise by par- 
taking in my degree of His food, by doing in my degree 
His work. I fell on my knees and I prayed to the 
Father. I rose, and, bethinking me of the words of 
the Son, I went and tried to do them. A new life 
awoke in me from that hour, feeble and dim, but yet 
life ; and often as it has stopped growing, that has been 
my own fault. Where it will end, thank God, I cannot 
tell. But existence is an awful grandeur and delight. 

Then I understood the state of my fellow-men, with 
all their ignorance, and hate, and revenge ; some misled 
by passion, some blinded by dullness, some turned 
monomaniacs from a fierce sense of injustice done 
them ; and I said : 

" There is no way of helping them but by being good 
to them, and making them trust me. But in every one 
of them there lies a secret chamber, to which God has 
access from behind by a hidden door, while they know 
nothing of this chamber ; and the other door towards 



Ii6 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

their own consciousness, is hidden by darkness and 
wrong, and ruin of all kinds. Sometimes they become 
dimly aware that there must be such a door. Some of 
us search for it, find it, turn back aghast ; while God is 
standing behind the door waiting to be found, and 
ready to hold forth the arms of eternal tenderness to 
him who will open and look. Some of us have torn 
the door open, and lo ! there is the Father, at the heart 
of us, at the heart of all things." 

cxv. 

The time of doubt and anxious questioning was far 
from over, but the time was long gone by — if in 
Robert's case it had ever been — when he could be like 
a wave of the sea, driven of the wind and tossed. He 
had ever one anchor of the soul, and he found that it 
held — the faith of Jesus, (I say the faith of Jesus, not 
his own faith in Jesus), the truth of Jesus, the life of 
Jesus. However his intellect might be tossed on the 
waves of speculation and criticism, he found that the 
word the Lord had spoken remained steadfast ; for in 
doing righteously, in loving mercy, in walking humbly, 
the conviction increased that Jesus knew the very secret 
of human life. Now and then some great vision 
gleamed across his soul, of the working of all things 
towards a far-off goal of simple obedience to a law of 
life, which God knew, and which His Son had justified 



THE NEW BIRTH. u 7 

through sorrow and pain. Again and again the words 
of the Master gave him a peep into a region where all 
was explicable, where all that was crooked might be 
made straight, where every mountain of wrong might 
be made low, and every valley of suffering exalted. 
Ever and again some one of the dark perplexities of 
humanity began to glimmer with light in its inmost 
depth. Nor was he without those moments of com- 
munion when the creature is lifted into the secret place 
of the Creator. 

Looking back to the time when it seemed that he 
cried and was not heard, he saw that God had been 
hearing, had been answering all the time \ had been 
making him capable of receiving the gift for which he 
prayed. He saw that intellectual difficulty encompass- 
ing the highest operations of harmonizing truth, can no 
more affect their reality than the dullness of chaos 
disprove the motions of the wind of God over the face 
of its waters. He saw that any true revelation must 
come out of the unknown in God, through the unknown 
in man. He saw that its truths must rise in the man 
as powers of life, and that only as that life grows and 
unfolds, can the ever-lagging intellect gain glimpses of 
partial outlines fading away into the infinite ; that, 
indeed, only in material things and the laws that belong 
to them, are outlines possible — even there, only in the 
picture of them which the mind that analvses them 
makes for itself, not in the things themselves 



u8 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CXVI. 

I could ill believe in a divine influence which did not 
take the person such as he was ; did not while giving 
him power from beyond him, leave his individuality 
uninjured, yea intensify it, subjecting the very means 
of its purification, the spread of the new leaven, to the 
laws of time and growth. To look at the thing from 
the other side, the genuineness of the man's reception 
of it, will be manifest in the meeting of his present 
conditions with the new thing — in the show of results 
natural to one of his degree of development. To hear 
a rude man utter his experience in the forms of culti- 
vation, would be at once to suspect the mere glitter of 
a reflex, and to doubt an illumination from within. I 
repeat the genuine influence shows itself such in show- 
ing that it has laid hold of the very man, at the very 
stage of growth he had reached. The dancing of 
David before the ark, the glow of St. Stephen's face, 
and the wild gestures and rude songs of miners, and 
fishers and negroes, may all be signs of the presence 
of the same spirit in temples various. Children will 
rush and shout and hallo for the same joy which sends 
others of the family to weep apart. 

Of course the one infallible test as to whether any 
such movement is of man without God, or of God 
within man, is the following life ; only a large space 
for fluctuation must be allowed where a whole world 



" THE NE IV BIRTH. 119 

of passions and habits has to be subjected to the will 
of God through the vice-gerency of a human will 
hardly or only just awakened, and as yet unconscious 
of itself. 

CXVII. 

The next morning the air was clear and fresh as a 
new-made soul. Bars of mottled clouds were bent 
across the eastern quarter of the sky, which lay like a 
great ethereal ocean ready for the launch of the ship 
of glory that was now gliding towards its edge. The 
lark sang of something greater than he could tell ; the 
wind got up, whispered at it, and lay down to sleep 
again. The clouds that formed the shore of the upper 
sea were already burning from saffron into gold. A 
moment more and the first insupportable thing of 
light would shoot from behind the edge of that low, 
blue hill. The well-spring of day, fresh and exuberant 
as if now, first from the holy will of the Father of 
Lights, gushed into the basin of the world, and the 
world, was more glad than tongue or pen can tell. The 
supernal light alone, dawning upon the human heart, 
can exceed the marvel of such a sunrise. 

And shall life itself be less beautiful than one of 
its days ? Do not believe it. Men call the shadow 
thrown upon the universe where their own dusky souls 
come between it and the eternal sun, life, and then 
mourn that it should be less bright than the hopes of 



J20 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

their childhood. Keep thou thy soul translucent that 
thou mayest never see its shadow ; at least never abuse 
thyself with the philosophy which calls that shadow 
life. Or rather would I say, become thou pure in heart, 
and thou shalt see God, whose vision alone is life. 

CXVIII. 

No worst thing ever done in the name of Christianity, 
no vilest corruption of the church, can destroy the 
eternal fact that the core of it is the heart of Jesus. 
Branches innumerable may have to be lopped off and 
cast into the fire, yet the word J am the vine, remaineth. 

CXIX. 

He did not know about him were folded the ever- 
lasting arms of the great, the one Ghost, which is 
the Death of death — the life and soul of all things 
and all thoughts. The Presence, indeed, was with him, 
and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and 
shadow, the sky and closed daisies : in all these things 
and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. 
Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could 
never have rejoiced in friend or desired ghost to mother 
him : still he knew not the Presence. But it was draw- 
ing nearer and nearer to his knowledge — even in 
sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower 



HEAR T OF CHRTS TIANI TV. 121 

and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to 
him, in him, as Life Himself. Then the man would 
know that in which the child had rejoiced. 

cxx. 

There is One who bringeth light out of darkness, 
joy out of sorrow, humility out of wrong. Back to the 
Father's house we go with the sorrows and sins which 
instead of inheriting the earth, we gathered and heaped 
upon our weary shoulders, and a different Elder 
Brother from that angry one who would not receive 
the poor swine humbled prodigal, takes the burden 
from our shoulders, and leads us into the presence of 
the Good. 

CXXI. 

Not for years and years had Janet been to church ; 
she had long been unable to walk so far; and having no 
book but the best, and no help to understand it but 
the highest, her faith was simple, strong, real, all-per- 
vading. Day by day she pored over the great Gospel — 
I mean just the good news according to Matthew and 
Mark and Luke and John — until she had grown to 
be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom of heaven 
— one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening 
to see God. For the Master, and His mind in hers, 
was her teacher. She had little or no theology save 



122 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

what He taught her or rather what He is. And of any 
other than "that, the less the better ; for no theology, 
except the Theou logos, is worth the learning, no other 
being true. To know Him is to know God. And he 
only who obeys Him, does or can know Him ; he who 
obeys Him cannot fail to know Him. To Janet, Jesus 
Christ was no object of so-called theological specula- 
tion, but a living man, who somehow or other heard 
her when she called to Him and sent her the help 
she needed. 

CXXII. 

" Gien He be life o' me, said Janet I hae no business 
wi' ony mair o't nor he gies me. I hae but to tak ae 
breath, be 't hard, be 't easy, ane at a time, an' lat 
Him see to the neist himsel. Here I am, an here's 
Him an 'at He winna lat's ain wark come to ill, that 
I'm well sure o.' An' ye micht jist think to yersel' 
Robert, at as ye are born intil the warl', an here ye 
are auld intil 't — ye may jist think, I say 'at hoo', 
ye're jist new-born an' beginnin' to grow yoong, an 
'at that's yer business. For naither you nor me can 
be that far frae hame, Robert, an whan we win there 
we'll be yoong eneuch, I'm thinkin'; an' no ower yoong, 
for we'll hae what they say ye canna get doon here — a 
puir o' auld heids upo' yoong shoothers." 

" Eh! but I wuss I may hae ye there, Janet, for I 



HEART OF CHRISTIANITY. 123 

kenna what I wad do wantin' ye. I wad be unco 
stray up yen'er gien I had to gang my lane, an' no you 
to refar till, 'at kens the w'ys o' the place." 

"I ken no more about the w'ys o' the place nor 
yersel', Robert, though I 'in thinkin' they'll be unco 
quaiet an' sensible, seem' 'at a' there maun be gentle 
fowk. It's eneuch to me 'at I'll be i' the hoose o' my 
Maister's father ; an' my Maister was weel content to 
gang to that hoose ; an' it maun be something by 
ordinar' 'at was fit for Him. But puir simple fowk 
like oorsel's 'ill hae no need to hing down the heid 
an' luik like gowks 'at disna ken a' the w'ys o' a 
muckle hoose 'at they hae never been intil i' their 
lives afore." 

CXXIII. 

Almost from the day, now many years ago, when 
because of distance and difficulty, she ceased to go 
to church, Janet had taken to her New Testament 
in a new fashion. 

She possessed an instinctive power of discriminating 
character, which had its root and growth in the sim- 
plicity of her own : she had always been a student 
of those phases of humanity that came within her 
ken ; she had a large share of that interest in her 
fellows and their affairs which is the very bloom 
upon ripe humanity : with these qualifications and 
the interoretative light afforded by her own calm 



124 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

practical way of living, she came to understand men 
and their actions, especially where the latter differed 
from what might ordinarily have been expected, in 
a marvelous way : her faculty amounted almost to 
sympathetic contact with the very humanity. When 
therefore,, she found herself in this remote spot 
where she could see so little of her kind, she began, 
she hardly knew by what initiation, to turn her study 
upon the story of our Lord's life. Nor was it long 
before it possessed her utterly, so that she concen- 
trated upon it all the light and power of vision she 
had gathered from her experience of humanity. It 
ought not, therefore, to be wonderful how much she 
now understood of the true humanity — with what 
simple directness she knew what many of the words 
of the Son of Man meant, and perceived many of the 
germs of his individual actions. Hence it followed 
naturally that the thought of Him, and the hope of 
one day seeing Him, became her one informing idea. 
She was now such another as those women who min- 
istered to him on the earth. 

A certain gentle indifference she showed to things 
considered important, the neighbors attributed to weak- 
ness of character, and called softness; while the honesty, 
energy, and directness with which she acted upon in- 
sights they did not possess, they attributed to intel- 
lectual derangement. She was " ower easy," they said 



EDUCATION. 125 

when the talk had been of prudence or worldly pros- 
pect; she was "ower hard," they said, when the ques- 
tion had been of right and wrong. 

CXXIV. 

Labor, sleep, thought, labor again, seems to me to 
be the right order with those who, earning their bread 
by the sweat of the brow, would yet remember that 
man shall not live by bread alone. Were it possible 
that our mechanics could attend the institutions called 
by their name in the morning, instead of the evening, 
perhaps we should not find them so ready to degenerate 
into places of mere amusement. I am not objecting to 
the amusement ; only to cease to educate in order to 
amuse is to degenerate. Amusement is a good and 
a sacred thing; but it is not on a par with education 
and, indeed, if it does not in any way further the 
growth of the higher nature, it cannot be called good 
at all. 

CXXV. 

In the spring, summer and autumn, Donal labored 
all day with his body, and in the evening as much 
as he could with his mind. Lover of nature as he 
was, however, more alive, indeed, than before to the 
delights of the country, and the genial companionship 
of terrene sights and sounds, scents and motions 



126 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

he could not help longing for the winter and the 
city, that his soul might be freer to follow its paths. 
And yet what a season some of the labors of the field 
afforded him for thought ! To the student who cannot 
think without books, the easiest of such labors are 
a dull burden, or a distress ; but for the man in whom 
the wells have been unsealed, in whom the waters 
are flowing, the labor mingles gently and genially with 
the thought, and the plough he holds with his hands 
lays open to the sun and the air, more soils than one. 

CXXVI. 

They are not the best students who are most de- 
pendent on books. What can be got out of them 
is at best only material : a" man must build his house 
for himself. 

CXXVII. 

Love is the first comforter, and where love and 
truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is 
never perceived. Love, indeed, is the highest in all 
truth : and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress 
of a child, will do more to save, sometimes, than the 
wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone 
is wisdom, love alone is power ; and where love, 
seems to fail, it is where self has stepped between 
and dulled the potency of its rays. 



LOVE. 127 

CXVIII. 

Nothing, so much as humble ministration to your 
neighbors, will help you to that perfect love of God 
which casteth out fear ; nothing but the love of Gocl 
— that God revealed .in Christ — will make you feel 
to love your neighbor aright : and the Spirit of Gocl, 
which alone gives might for any good, will by these 
loves, which are life, strengthen you at last to believe 
in the light even in the midst of darkness : to hold 
the resolution formed in health when sickness has 
altered the appearance of everything around you : 
and to feel tenderly towards your fellow, even when 
you yourself are plunged in dejection or racked with 
pain. 

CXXIX. 

Where the struggle for one's own life is in abeyance, 
and the struggle for other life active, there the heart 
that God thought out and means to perfect, the pure 
love-heart of His humans, reveals itself truly, and is 
gracious to behold. For then the will of the individual 
sides divinely with His divine impulse, and his heart 
is unified in good. When the will of the man sides 
perfectly with the holy impulses in him, then all is 
well ; for then his mind is one with the mind of his 
Maker; God and man are one. 



128 CHEERFUL WORDS, 

cxxx. 

Each relation of life has its peculiar beauty of holi- 
ness ; but that beauty is the expression of its essential 
truth, and the essence itself is so strong that it be- 
stows upon its embodiment even the power of partial 
metamorphosis with all other vital relations. How 
many daughters have in the devotion of their tender- 
ness become as mothers to their own fathers. Who 
has not known some sister more of a wife to a man 
then she for whose sake he neglected her ? But it will 
take the loves of all the relations of life gathered in 
one, to shadow the love, which, in the kingdom of 
heaven, is recognized as one to each from each hu- 
man being perse. It is for the sake of the essential 
human that all human relations and all forms of them 
exist — that we may learn what it is, and become ca- 
pable of loving it aright. 

CXXXI. 

Silly youth and maidens count themselves martyrs 
of love, when they are but the pining witnesses to 
a delicious and entrancing selfishness. But do not 
mistake me through confounding, on the other hand 
the desire to be loved — which is neither wrong nor 
noble — any more than hunger is either wrong or 
noble — and the delight in being loved to be devoid 



LOVE 



129 



of which a man must be lost in an immeasurably- 
deeper, in an evil, ruinous, yea, a fiendish selfish- 
ness. Not to care for love is the still worse reaction 
from the self-soiled and outward greed of love. Gib- 
bie's love was a diamond among gem-loves. There 
are men whose love to a friend is less selfish than 
their love to the dearest woman; but Gibbie's was 
not a love to be less divine towards a woman than 
towards a man. One man's love is as different from 
another's as the one is himself different from the other. 
The love that dwells in one man is an angel, the love 
in the other is a bird, that in another a hog. Some 
would count worthless the love of a man who loved 
everybody. There would be no distinction in being 
loved by such a man ! — and distinction as a guarantee 
of their own great growth, is what such seek. There 
are women who desire to be the sole object of a man's 
affection, and are all their lives devoured by unlawful 
jealousies. A love that had never gone forth upon 
human being, but themselves, would be to them the 
treasure to sell all that they might buy. And the 
man who bought such a love might in truth be all 
absorbed therein himself — just because he was the 
poorest of the creatures — therefore all absorbed in 
the poorest of loves. A heart has to be taught to 
love, and its first lesson, however learnt, no more 
makes it perfect in love than the ABC makes a 
savant. The man who loves most will love best. The 



l 3 o CHEERFUL WORDS. 

man who thoroughly loves God and his neighbor, is 
the only man who will love a woman ideally — who 
can love her with the love God thought of between 
them when He made man male and female. The 
man, I repeat, who loves God with his very life, and 
his neighbor as Christ loves him, is the man who alone 
is capable of grand, perfect, glorious love to any 
woman. 

CXXXII. 

Perfect love is the mother of all duties and all 
virtues, and needs not be admonished of her child- 
ren ; but not until love is perfected, may she, casting 
out fear, forget also duty. 

CXXXIII. 

The passion of love is but the vestibule — the pylon 
— to the temple of love. A garden lies between the 
pylon and the apytum. They that will enter the sanc- 
tuary must walk through the garden. But some start 
to see the roses already withering, sit down and 
weep and watch their decay, until at length the aged 
flowers hang drooping all around them, and lo ! their 
hearts are withered also, and when they rise they 
turn their backs on the holy of holies, and their feet 
towards the gate. 

Juliet was proud of her Paul, and loved him as much 



LOVE. 131 

as she was yet capable of loving. But she had thought 
they were enough for each other, and already, although 
she was far from acknowledging it to herself, she had 
in the twilight of her thinking began to doubt it. 
Nor can she be blamed for the doubt. Never man 
and woman yet succeeded in being all in all to each 
other. 

It were presumption to say that a lonely God would 
be enough for Himself, seeing that we can know nothing 
of God but as He is our Father. What if the Creator 
Himself is sufficient to Himself in virtue of his self- 
existent creatorship 1 Let my reader think it out. 
The lower we go in the scale of creation, the more 
independent is the individual. The richer and more 
perfect each of a married pair is in the other rela- 
tions of life, the more is each to the other. For us 
the children of eternal love, the very air our spirits 
breathe, and without which they cannot live, is the 
eternal life for us, the brothers and sisters of a court- 
less family, the very space in which our souls can 
exist, is the love of each other, and every soul of our 
kind. 

CXXXIV. 

When the human soul is not yet able to receive the 
vision of the God-man, God sometimes — might I' not 
say always, — reveals Himself, or at least gives Him- 
self, in some human being whose face, whose hands, 



1 32 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

are the ministering of angels of this unacknowledged 
presence to keep alive the field of love, on the altar 
of the heart until God hath provided the sacrifice — 
that is until the soul is strong enough to draw it from 
the concealing thicket. 

cxxxv. 

I told my people that God had created all our wor- 
ships, reverences, tendernesses, loves. That they had 
come out of His heart, and He had made them in us 
because they were in Him first. That otherwise He 
would not have cared to make them. That all that 
we could imagine of the wise, the lovely the beautiful, 
was in Him, only infinitely more of them than we 
could not merely imagine but understand, even if He 
did all He could to explain them to us, to make us 
understand them. That in Him was all the wise teach- 
ing of the best man ever known in the world and more; 
all the grace and gentleness and truth of the best 
child and more : all the tenderness and devotion of 
the truest type of womankind and more : for there is 
a love that passeth the love of woman, not the love 
of Jonathan to David, though David said so ; but the 
love of God to the men and women whom He has 
made. Therefore, we must be all God's and all our 
aspirations, all our worships, all our honors, all our 
loves, must center in Him, the Best. 



FAITH. 133 

CXXXVI. 

How few are there whose faith is simple and mighty 
in the Father of Jesus Christ, waiting to believe all that 
He will reveal to them ! How many of those who talk 
of faith as the one needful thing, will accept as sufficient 
to the razing of the walls of partition between you and 
them, your heartiest declaration that you believe in 
Him with the whole might of your nature, lay your 
soul bare to the revelation of His spirit, and stir up 
your will to obey Him ? And then comes your tempta- 
tion — to exclude, . namely, from your love and sym- 
pathy the weak and boisterous brethren who, after the 
fashion possible to them, believe in your Lord, because 
they exclude you and put as little confidence in your 
truth as in your insight. If you do know more of 
Christ than they, upon you lies the heavier obligation 
to be true to them as was St. Paul to the Judaizing 
Christians whom these so much resemble, who were his 
chief hindrance in the work his master had given him 
to do. In Christ we must forget Paul, and Apollos, 
and Cephas, pope, and bishop, and pastor, and pres- 
byter, creed, and interpretation, and theory. Careless 
of their opinions, we must be careful of themselves — 
careful that we have salt in ourselves, and that the 
salt lose not its savor, that the old man, dead through 
Christ, shall not, vampire-like, creep from his grave 
and suck the blood of the saints, by whatever name 



134 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

they be called, or however little they may yet have en- 
tered into the freedom of the Gospel that God is light, 
and in Him is no darkness at all. 

CXXXVII. 

A rough shaking of so-called faith, has been of end- 
less service to many, chiefly by exposing the in- 
security of all foundations of belief, save that which 
is discovered in digging with the spade of obedience. 
Well, indeed, is it, for all honest souls, to be thus 
shaken, who have been building upon doctrines con- 
cerning Christ, upon faith, upon experiences, upon 
anything but Christ, Himself, as revealed by Him- 
self, and His spirit to all who obey Him, and so re- 
vealing the Father. 

CXXXVIII. 

She never imagined that words were necessary ; she 
believed that God knew her every thought, and that 
the moment she lifted up her heart, it entered into 
communion with Him ; but the very sound of the words 
she spoke seemed to make her feel nearer to the man, 
who being the eternal Son of the Father, yet had 
ears to hear, and lips to speak, like herself. To talk 
to Him aloud, also kept her thoughts together, helped 
her to feel the fact of the things she contemplated, 
as well as the reality of His presence. 



FAITH. 135 

CXXXIX. 

A man may look another in the face for a hundred 
years and not know him ! Men have looked Jesus 
Christ in the face, and not known either Him or His 
Father. It was needful that He should appear to be- 
gin the knowing of Him, but speedily was His visible 
presence taken away, that it might not become, as 
assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from 
men the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the 
assurance of some sensible sign? Do you ask why 
no intellectual proof is to be had ? I tell you that 
such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for 
you that better, that best, that only vision, into which 
at last your world must blossom — such a contact, 
namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a per- 
ception of His being, and His absolute oneness with 
you, the child of His thought, the individuality softly 
parted from His presence and love as, by its own 
radiance, will sweep doubt away forever. Being then 
in the light, and knowing it, the lack of intellectual 
proof concerning that which is too high for it will 
trouble you no more than would your inability to si- 
lence a metaphysician who declared that you had no 
real existence. It is for the sake of such vision as 
God would give, that you are denied such vision as 
you would have. The Father of our spirits is not 
content that we should know Him as we know each 



136 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

other. There is a better, closer, nearer than any- 
human way of knowing, and to that he is guiding us 
across all the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas 
of our faithlessness, the deserts of our ignorance. Is 
it so very hard that we should have to wait for that 
which we cannot yet receive ? Shall we complain of 
the shadows cast upon our souls by the hand and the 
napkin polishing their mirrors to the receiving of the 
more excellent glory ? Have patience, children of the 
Father. Pray always, and do not faint. The mists 
and the storms and the cold will pass ; the sun and 
the sky are for evermore. There were no volcanoes 
and no typhoons but for the warm heart of the earth, 
the soft garment of the air, and the lordly sun over 
all. The most loving of you cannot imagine how 
one day the love of the Father will make you love 
even your own. 

CXL. 

It was strange and touching to see the sightless 
man busy about light for others. A marvellous sym- 
bol of faith he was — not only believing in sight, but 
in the mysterious, and to him altogether unintelligible, 
means, by which others saw ! In thus lending his aid 
to a faculty in which he had no share, he himself fol- 
lowed the trail of the garments of Light, stooping 
ever and anon to lift and bear her skirts. He haunted 



WORK. 137 

the steps of the unknown Power, and flitted about the 
walls of her temple, as we mortals haunt the borders 
of the immortal land, knowing nothing of what lies 
behind the unseen veil, yet believing in an unrevealed 
grandeur. 

CXLI. 

The same recipe that Goethe gave for enjoyment 
of life applies equally to all work. " Do the thing that 
lies next you." That is all our business. Hurried re- 
sults are worse than none. We must force nothing, but 
be partakers of the divine patience. How long it took 
to make the cradle ! and we feel troubled that the baby 
Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it 
is not understanding the Gospel. of St. John ! If there 
is one thing evident in the world's history, it is that 
God hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time 
is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the 
church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many 
of the officers, too, not out of the awkward squad. 
In the drill, a man has to conquer himself, and move 
with the rest by individual attention to his own duty • 
to what mighty battle-fields the recruit may yet be led 
he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough to 
do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single 
combat, skirmish, and light-cavalry work, generally, to 
get him ready for whatever is to follow. 



138 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CXLII. 

Just as I turned the corner, and the smell of the 
wood reached me, the picture so often associated in 
my mind with such a scene of human labor rose be- 
fore me. I -saw the Lord of Life bending over His 
bench, fashioning some lowly utensil for some house- 
wife of Nazareth. And He would receive payment 
for it too ; for He at least could see no disgrace in 
the order of things that His Father had appointed. 
It is the vulgar mind that looks down on the earning, 
and worships the inheriting of money. How infinitely 
more poetic is the belief that our Lord did His work 
like any other honest man, than that straining after 
His glorification in the early centuries of the church 
by the invention of fables, even to the disgrace of 
His Father ! They say that Joseph was a bad carpen- 
ter, and our Lord had to work miracles to set the 
things right which he had made wrong ! To such a 
class of mind as invented these fables do those belong 
who think they honor our Lord when they judge 
anything human too common or too unclean for Him 
to have done. 

CXLIII. 

On Sundays, Malcolm was always more or less an- 
noyed by the obtrusive presence of his arms and legs, 
accompanied by a vague feeling that, at any moment, 



THE SABBATH. 139 

and no warning given, they might with some insane 
and irrepressible flourish, break the Sabbath on their 
own account, and degrade him in the eyes of his fellow- 
townsmen, who seemed all silently watching how he bore 
the restraints of the holy day. It must be conceded, 
however, that the discomfort had quite as much to do 
with his Sunday clothes as with the Sabbath-day, and 
that it interfered but little with an altogether peculiar 
calm, which appeared to him to belong in its own right 
to the Sunday, whether its light flowed in the sunny 
cataracts of June, or oozed through the spongy clouds 
of November. As he walked again to the Alton, or Old 
Town in the evening, the filmy floats of white in the 
lofty blue, the droop of the long, dark grass by the side 
of the short bright corn, the shadows pointing, like all 
lengthening shadows, towards the quarter of hope, the 
yellow glory filling the air and paling the green below, 
the unseen larks hanging aloft — like air-pitcher plants 
that overflowed in song — like electric jars emptying 
themselves of the sweet thunder of bliss in the flash- 
ing of wings and the trembling of melodious throats ; 
these were indeed of the summer, but the cup of rest 
had been poured out upon them ; the Sabbath brooded 
like an embodied peace over the earth, and under its 
wings they grew seven-fold peaceful — with a peace 
that might be felt, like the hand of a mother pressed 
upon the half-sleeping child. 



140 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CXLIV. 

She had not yet come to see that in whatever trouble 
a man may find himself, the natural thing being to 
make his request known, his brother may heartily tell 
him to pray.? Why, what can a man do but pray ? 
He is here — helpless : and his Origin, the breather 
of his soul, his God, may be somewhere. And 
what else should he pray about but the thing that 
troubles him? Not surely the thing that does not 
trouble him ! What is the trouble there for, but to 
make him cry ? It is the pull of God at his being. 
Let a man only pray. Prayer is the sound to which 
not merely is the ear of the Father open, but for which 
that ear is listening. Let him pray for the thing he 
thinks he needs : for what else, I repeat, can he pray ? . 
Let a man cry for that in whose loss life is growing 
black : the heart of the Father is open. Only let the 
man know that, even for his prayer, the Father will not 
give him a stone. But let the man pray, and let God 
see to it how to answer him. If in his childishness and 
ignorance he should ask for a serpent, He will not give 
him a serpent. But it may yet be the Father will find 
some way of giving him his heart's desire. God only 
knows how rich God is in power of gift. See what He 
has done to make Himself able to give to His own 
heart's desire. The giving of His Son was as the knife 



PRA YER. 141 

with which He would divide Himself among His chil- 
dren. He knows, He only, the heart, the needs, the 
deep desires, the hungry eternity, of each of them all. 
Therefore let every man ask of God, who giveth to all 
men liberally and upbraideth not — and see at least 
what will come of it. 

But he will speak like one of the foolish if he say 
thus, " Let God hear me, and give me my desire, and 
I will trust in Him." That would be to tempt the Lord 
his God. If a father gives his children their will, in- 
stead of His, they may well turn on him again and 
say : 

" Was it then the part of a father to give me a scor- 
pion because, not knowing what it was, I asked for it ? 
I besought him for a fancied joy, and lo ! it is a sorrow 
for evermore ! " 

But it may be that sometimes God indeed does so, 
and to such a possible complaint has this reply in him- 
self; "I gave thee what thou wouldst, because not 
otherwise could I teach the stiff-necked his folly. 
Hadst thou been patient, I would have made the 
thing a joy ere I gave it thee ; I would have changed 
the scorpion into a golden beetle, set with rubies and 
sapphires. Have thou patience now.' 

CXLV. 

Every sin discovered in one's own soul must be a 



142 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

pledge of renewed bliss in its removing. And when 
the thought came of what St. Paul had said somewhere 
" whatever is not of faith is sin " — I thought what 
a weight of sin had to be lifted from the earth, and 
how blessed it might be. But what could I do for it ? 
I could just-begin with myself, and pray God for that 
inward light which is His spirit, that so I might see Him 
in everything and rejoice in everything as His gift, and 
then all things would be holy, for whatsoever is of faith 
must be the opposite of sin ; and that was my part to- 
wards heaving the weight of sin, which, like myriads 
of gravestones, was pressing the life out of us men, off 
the whole world. 

CXLIV. 

I suspect we shall find some day that the loss of 
the human paradise consists chiefly in the closing of 
the human eyes ; that at least, far more of it than 
people think remains about us still, only we are so 
filled with foolish desires and evil cares that we cannot 
seer or hear, cannot even smell or taste the pleasant 
things round about us. We have need to pray in 
regard to the right receiving of the things of the 
senses even, "Lord open thou our hearts to under- 
stand Thy Word," for each of these things is as 
certainly a word of God as Jesus is the word of 
God. 



DREAMS. 143 

CXLVII. 

If it is right to thank God for a beautiful thought — 
I mean a thought of strength and grace giving one 
fresh life and hope — why should one be less bold to 
thank Him when such thoughts arise in plainer shape 
— take such vivid forms to the mind that they seem to 
come through the doors of the eyes into the vestibule 
of the brain, and thence into the inner chambers of 
the soul ? 

CXLVIII. 

If so much of our life is actually spent in dreaming, 
there must be some place in our literature for what 
corresponds to dreaming. Even in this region, we 
cannot step beyond the boundaries of our nature. I 
delight in reading Lord Bacon, now ; but one of Jean 
Paul's dreams will often give me more delight than 
one of Bacon's best paragraphs. It depends upon the 
mood. Some dreams, like those in poetry or in sleep, 
arouse individual states of conciousness, altogether 
different from any of our waking moods, and not to 
be recalled by any mere effort of will. All our being, 
for the moment, has a new and strange coloring. We 
have another kind of life. I think myself, our life 
would be much poorer without our dreams ; a thousand 



144 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

rainbow-tints and combinations would be gone ; music 
and poetry would lose many an indescribable exquisite- 
ness and tenderness. You see, I like to take our 
dreams seriously, as I would even our fun. For I 
believe that those new mysterious feelings that come 
to us in sleep, if they be only from dreams of a richer 
grass and a softer wind than we have known awake, 
are indications of wells of feeling and delight which 
have not yet broken out of their hiding-places in our 
souls, and are only to be suspected from these wings 
of fairy green that spring up in the high places of 
our sleep. 

CXLIX. 

There never was a vagary that uplifted the soul, or 
made the grand words flow from the gates of speech, 
that had not its counterpart in truth itself. Man can 
imagine nothing, even in the clouds of the air, that 
God has not done, or is not doing. Then, as the 
cloudy giant yields, and is " shepherded by the slow, 
unwilling wind," so is each of us borne onward to an 
unseen destiny — a glorious one if we will but yield to 
the Spirit of God that bloweth where it listeth — with 
a grand listing — coming whence we know not, and 
going whither we know not. The very clouds of the 
air are hung up as dim pictures of the thoughts and 
history of man. 



THE IMAGINATION. 145 

CL. 

The direction in which his imagination ran forward 
was always that in which his reason pointed ; and so 
long as Gibbie's fancies were bud-blooms upon his 
obedience, his imagination could not be otherwise than 
in harmony with h'is reason. Imagination is a poor 
root, but a worthy blossom, and in a nature like Gib- 
bie's its flowers cannot fail to be lovely. For no out- 
come of a man's nature is so like himself as his imag- 
ination, except it be his fancies, indeed. Perhaps his 
imagination shows what he is meant to be, his fancies 
what he is making of himself. 

CLI. 

I walked out in the snow. Since the storm, it had 
fallen again, quietly and plentifully ; and now in the 
sunlight, the world — houses and trees, ponds and 
rivers — was like a creation more than blocked out, 
but far from finished — in marble. 

" And this," I said to myself, as I regarded the won- 
drous loveliness with which the snow had at once 
clothed and disfigured the bare branches of the trees, 
"this is what has come of the chaos of falling flakes! 
To this repose of beauty has the storm settled and 
sunk ! Will it not be so with our mental storms 
as well ? " 



146 cheerful words. 

But here the figure displeased me ; for those were 
not the true, right shapes of the things ; and the truth 
does not stick to things, but shows itself out of them. 

" This lovely show," I said, " is the result of a busy- 
fancy. This white world is the creation of a poet 
such as Shelley, in whom the fancy was too much for 
the intellect. Fancy settles upon anything; half de- 
stroys its form, half beautifies it with something that 
is not its own. But the true creative imagination, the 
form-seer, and the form-bestower, falls like the rain 
in the spring night, vanishing amid the roots of the 
trees ; not settling upon them in clouds of wintry 
white, but breaking forth from them in clouds of 
summer green." 

CLII. 

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The 
winter also is His. And into His winter He came to 
visit us. And all man's winters are His — the winter of 
our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of 
our unhappiness — even the " winter of our discontent." 
Winter does not belong to death, although the outside 
of it looks like death. Beneath the snow the grass 
is growing. Below the frost the roots are warm and 
alive. Winter is only a spring too weak and feeble for 
us to see that it is living. The cold does for all things 
what the gardener has sometimes to do for valuable 



DISCIPLINE. 147 

trees — he must half kill them before they will bear 
any fruit. Winter is in truth the small beginning' 
of spring. 

CLIII. 

Like lovers they walked out together, with eyes only 
for each other, for the good news had made them shy 
— through the lane, into the cross street, and out into 
Pine street, along which they went westward, meeting 
the gaze of the low sun, which wrapt them around in 
a veil of light and dark, for the light made their eyes 
dark, so that they seemed feeling their way out of the 
light into the shadow. 

" This is like life," said the pastor, looking down at 
the precious face beside him: "our eyes can best see 
from under the shadow of afflictions." 

" I would rather it were from under the shadow of 
God's wings," replied Dorothy, timidly. 

" So it is ! so it is ! Afflictions are but the shadow 
of His wings," said her father, eagerly. "Keep there 
my child, and you will never need the afflictions I have 
needed. I have been a hard one to save." 

But the child thought within herself, " Alas ! father ! 
you have never had any afflictions which you or I either 
could not bear tenfold better than what I have to 
bear." 

She was perhaps right. Only she did not know that 
when she got through, all would be disfigured with 



148 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

the light of her resurrection, just as her father's poverty 
now was in the light of his plenty. 

CLIV. 

While the cup of blessing may and often does run 
over, I doubt if the cup of suffering is ever more than 
filled to the brim. 

CLV. 

SHALL THE DEAD PRAISE THEE? 

I cannot praise Thee. By his instrument 
The organ master sits, nor moves a hand ; 

For see the organ-pipes o'erthrown and bent, 

Twisted and broke, like corn-stalks tempest-fanned 1 

I well could praise Thee for a flower, a dove ; 

But not for life that is not life in me ; 
Not for a being that is less than love — 

A barren shoal half lifted from a sea. 

And for the land whence no wind bloweth ships, 
And all my living dead ones thither blown — 

Rather I'd kiss no more their precious lips, 
Than carry them a heirt so poor and prone. 

Yet I do bless Thee Thou art what Thou art, 
That Thou dost know Thyself what Thou dost knew — 

A perfect, simple, tender, rhythmic heart, 
Beating Thy blood to all in bounteous flow. 



COURAGE 149 

And I can bless Thee too, for every smart, 
For every disappointment, ache, and fear ; 

For every hook Thou fixest in my heart, 
For every burning cord that draws me near. 

But prayer these wake ; not song. Thyself I crave. 

Come Thou or all Thy gifts away I fling. 
Thou silent, I am but an empty grave : 

Think to me, Father, and I am a king. 

Then, like the wind-stirred bones, my pipes shall quake, 
The air burst, as from burning house the blaze, 

And swift contending harmonies shall shake 
Thy windows with a storm of jubilant praise. 

Thee praised, I haste me humble to my own — 
Then love, not shame shall bow me at their feet, 

Then first and only to my stature grown, 
Fulfilled of love, a servant all complete. 

CLVI. 

Many men who have courage, are dependent on 
ignorance, and a low state of the moral feeling for 
that courage; and a farther progress towards the 
development of the higher nature would, for a time 
at least, entirely overthrow it. Nor could such loss 
of courage be rightly designated by the name of 
cowardice. 

CLVI I. 
The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the 



150 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

object of it ; and the man who can overcome his own 
terror is a man and more. 

CLVIII. 

There are victories far worse than defeats ; and to 
overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his 
strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a 
devil, is one of the poorest. 

CLIX. 

My own conviction is, that if a man would but bend 
his energies to live, if he would but try to be a true 
that is, a god-like man, in all his dealings with his 
fellows, a genuine neighbor and not a selfish unit, he 
would open such channels for the flow of the Spirit, 
as no amount of even honest and so-called successful 
preaching could. 

CLX. 

LET YOUR LIGHT SO SHINE. 

Sometimes O Lord, Thou lightest in my head 
A lamp that well might Pharos all the lands; 

Anon the light will neither burn nor spread, 
Shrouded in danger gray the beacon stands. 



EXAMPLE. 151 

A Pharos ? Oh, dull brain J Oh, poor quenched lamp, 
Under a bushel, with an earthy smell I 

Moldering it lies, in rust and eating damp 

While the slow oil keeps oozing from its cell ! 

For me it were enough to be a flower 
Knowing its root in Thee was somewhere hid — 

To blossom at the far appointed hour. 
And fold in sleep when Thou, my Nature, bid. 

But hear my brethren crying in the dark! 

Light up my lamp that it may shine abroad, 
Fain would I cry — See brothers ! Sisters, mark I 

This is the shining of light's father, God. 

CLXI. 

It is much easier to persuade men that God cares 
for certain observances, than that He cares for simple 
honesty and truth, and gentleness and loving-kindness. 
The man who would shudder at the idea of a rough 
word of the description commonly called swearing, 
will not even have a twinge of conscience after a whole 
morning of ill-tempered sullenness, capricious scolding^ 
villainously unfair animadversion, or surly cross-grained 
treatment, generally, of wife and children ! Such a 
man will omit neither family worship, nor a sneer at 
his neighbor. He will neither milk his cow on the 
first day of the week without a Sabbath mask on his 
face, nor remove it while he waters the milk for his 
customers. 



152 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CLXII. 

I fancy that until a man loves space, he will never 
be at peace in a place. At least so I have found it. 
I am content if you but give me room. All space to 
me throbs with being and life ; and the loveliest spot 
on the earth seems but the compression of space till 
the meaning shines out of it, as the fire flies out of 
the air when you drive it close together. 

CLXIII. 

That man only who rises above the small yet mighty 
predilection, who sets the self of his own consciousness 
behind his back, and cherishes only the self of the 
Father's thought, the anger that beholds the eternal 
face, that man only is a free and noble being, he only 
breathes the air of the infinite. 

CLXIV. 

All the doors that lead inwards to the secret place 
of the Most High, are doors outwards — out of self, 
out of smallness — out of wrong. 

CLXV. 

I presume that in a right condition of our nervous 



HEALTH. 153 

nature, instead of our being, as some would tell us, 
less exposed to the influences of nature, we should in 
fact, be altogether open to them. Our nerves would 
be a thoroughfare for nature in all and each of her 
moods and feelings, stormy or peaceful, sunshiny or 
sad. The true refuge from the slavery to which this 
would expose us, the subjection of man to circum- 
stance, is to be found, not in the deadening of the 
nervous constitution, or in a struggle with the influ- 
ences themselves, but in the strengthening of the 
moral and refining of the spiritual nature ; so that, as 
the storms rave through the vault of heaven, without 
breaking its strong arches with their winds, or stain- 
ing its ethereal blue with their rain-clouds, the soul 
of man should keep clear and steady and great, hold- 
ing within it its own feelings and even passions, know- 
ing that let them moan or rave as they will, they can- 
not touch the nearest verge of the empyrean dome, in 
whose region they have their birth and being. 

CLXVI. 

Relish may be called the digestion of the palate ; 
interest, the digestion of the inner ears ; both signifi- 
cant of further digestion to follow. The food thus 
relished may not be the best food ; and yet it may be 
the best food for the patient, because he feels no 
repugnance to it, and can digest and assimilate, as 



154 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

well as swallow it. For my part I believe in no 
cramming, bodily or mental. I think nothing learned 
without interest can be of the slightest after-b'enefit ; 
and although the effort may comprise a moral good, 
it involves a considerable intellectual injury. All I 
have said applies with still greater force to religious 
teaching. 

CLXVII. 

I can no more describe the motion aroused in my 
mind by a gray cloud, parting over a gray stone, by the 
smell of a sweet pea, by the sight of one of those 
long, upright pennons of striped grass, with the homely 
name, than I can tell what the glory of God is who 
made these things. The man whose poetry is like 
nature in this, that it produces individual, incommuni- 
cable moods and conditions of mind — ■ a sense of ele- 
vated, tender, marvellous and evanescent existence — 
must be a poet, indeed. Every dawn of such a feel- 
ing is a light-brushed bubble, rendering visible for a 
moment the dark, unknown sea of our being which 
lies beyond the lights of our consciousness, and is the 
stuff and the region of our eternal growth. But think 
what language must become before it will tell dreams ! 
- — before it will convey the delicate shades of fancy 
that come and go in the brain of a child ! — before it 
will let a man know wherein one face differeth from 
another face in glory ! I suspect, however, that for 



THE POET. 155 

such purposes it is rather music than articulation that 
is needful ; that with a hope of these finer results, the 
language must rather be turned into music, than logi- 
cally executed. 

CLXVIII. 

It is a ruinous misjudgment — too contemptible to 
be asserted, but not too contemptible to be acted upon, 
that the end of poetry is publication. Its true end 
is to help first the man who makes it, along the path 
to the truth : help for other people may or may not 
be in it: that, if it become a question at all, must 
be an after one. To the man who has it, the gift is 
invaluable ; and in proportion as it helps him to be 
a better man, it is of value to the whole world ; but 
it may, in itself, be so nearly worthless, that the pub- 
lishing of it would be more for harm than good. Ask 
any one who has had to perform the unenviable duty 
of editor to a magazine : he will corroborate what I 
say — that the quanity of verse good enough to be its 
own reward, but without the smallest claim to be ut- 
tered to the world, is enormous. 

CLXIX. 

Was music ever born of torture, of misery? It is 
only when the cloud of sorrow is sinking in the sun- 
rays that the song-larks awake and' ascend. A glory 



156 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of some sort must fringe the skirts of any sadness, 
the light of the sorrowing soul itself must be shed 
upon it, and the cloud must be far enough removed 
to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of 
the stuff of which songs are made. And this light 
that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the 
sorrow — hope so little recognized as such that it is 
often called despair? It is reviving and not decay 
that sings even the saddest of songs. 

CLXX. 

Her music was old-fashioned of course ; but I have 
a fancy that perhaps the older the music one learns 
first, the better ; for the deeper is thereby the rooting 
of that which will have the atmosphere of the age 
to blossom in. But then to every lover of the truth, 
a true thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and 
dearer because it is new-fashioned ; and true music like 
true love, like all truth, laughs at the god Fashion be- 
cause it knows him to be but an ape. 

CLXXI. 

How true must be the bliss up to which the intense 
realities of sorrows are needful to force the way for 
the faithless heart and the feeble will ! Lord, like 
the people of old, we need yet the background of the 



SORROW. 157 

thunder-cloud against which to behold Thee, but one 
day the only darkness around Thy dwelling will be the 
too much of Thy brightness. For Thou art the perfec- 
tion which every heart sighs towards, no mind can 
attain unto. If Thou wast one whom created mind 
could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small for those 
whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infi- 
nite creatures that seek their God, a being to love and 
know infinitely. For the created to know perfectly 
would be to be damned forever in the nutshell of 
the finite. He who is his own cause alone can un- 
derstand perfectly and remain infinite, for that which 
is known and that which knows are in Him the same 
infinitude. 

CLXXII. 

You close your doors and brood over your own mis- 
eries, and the wrongs people have done you; whereas, 
if you would but open those doors, you might come 
out into the Jight of God's truth, and see that His 
heart is as clear as sunlight towards you. You won't 
believe this, and therefore naturally you can't quite 
believe that there is a God at all : for, indeed a being 
that was not all light would be no God at all. If you 
would but let Him teach you, you would find your 
perplexities melt away like the snow in spring, till 
you could hardly believe you had ever felt them. No 
arguing will convince you of a God ; but let Him once 



158 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

come in, and all argument will be tenfold useless to 
convince you that there is no God. 

CLXXIII. 

Anything that gives objectivity to trouble, that lifts 
the cloud so far that, if but for a moment, it shows 
itself a cloud, instead of being felt an enveloping, pen- 
etrating, palsying mist, setting it where the mind can 
in its turn prey upon it, can play with it, paint it, may 
come to sing of it, is a great help towards what health 
may yet be possible for the troubled soul. 

CLXXIV. 

There is no dignity but of service. How different 
the whole notion of training is now from what it was 
in the middle ages ! Service was honorable then. No 
doubt we have made progress as a whole, but in some 
things we have degenerated sadly. The first thing 
taught then was how to serve. No man could rise 
to the honor of knighthood without service. A noble- 
man's son even had to wait on his father, or to go 
into the family of anothei nobleman and wait upon 
him as a page, standing behind his chair at dinner. 
This was an honor. No notion of degradation was in 
it. It was a necessary step to higher honor. And 



SERVICE. 159 

what was the next higher honor ? To be set free from 
service? No. To serve in the harder service of the 
field ; to be a squire to some noble knight ; to tend 
his horse, to clean his armor, to see that every rivet 
was sound, every buckle true, every strap strong ; to 
ride behind him and carry his spear, and if more than 
one attacked him, to rush to his aid. This service was 
the more honorable because it was harder, and was 
the next step to higher honor yet. And what was this 
higher honor ? That of knighthood. Wherein did 
this knighthood consist ? The very word means sim- 
ply service. And for what was the knight thus waited 
upon by the squire ? That he might be free to do 
as he pleased ? No ; but that he might be free to be 
the servant of all. By being a squire first, the servant 
of one, he learned to rise to the higher rank, that of 
servant of all. His horse was tended, his armor ob- 
served, his sword and spear and shield held to his 
hand, that he might have no trouble looking after 
himself, but might be free, strong, unwearied, to shoot 
like an arrow to the rescue of any and every one 
who needed his ready aid. There was a grand heart 
of Christianity in that old chivalry, notwithstanding 
all its abuses, which must be no more laid to its 
charge, than the burning of Jews and heretics to Chris- 
tianity. It was the lack of it, not the presence of it, 
that occasioned the abuses that co-existed with it. 



160 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CLXXV. 

It is true that the business God gives a man to do, 
may be said to be the peculiar walk in life into which 
he is led, but that is only as distinguishing it from 
another man's peculiar business. God gives us all 
our business, and the business which is common to 
humanity is more peculiarly God's business than that 
which is one man's and not another's — because it 
lies nearer the root, and is essential. It does not 
matter whether a man is a farmer or a physician, but 
it greatly matters whether he is a good son, a good 
husband, and so on. Oh if the world could but be 
brought to believe — the world did I say ? — if the best 
men in the world could only see as God sees it, that 
service is in itself the noblest exercise of human 
powers, if they could see that God is the hardest 
worker of all, and that His nobility are those who do 
the most service, surely it would alter the whole aspect 
of the church. Menial offices, for instance, would soon 
cease to be talked of with that contempt which shows 
that there is no true recognition of the fact that the 
same principle runs through the highest duty and the 
lowest — that the lowest work which God gives a man 
to do, must be in its nature noble, as certainly noble 
as the highest. This would destroy condescension, 
which is the rudeness, yea impertinence, of the higher, 
as it would destroy insolence,' which is the rudeness 



HUMANITY. 161 

of the lower. He who recognized the dignity of his 
own lower office, would thereby recognize the superi- 
ority of the higher office, and would be the last either 
to envy or degrade it. He would see it in his own — 
only higher, only better, and revere it. 

CLXXVI. 

While nobody can do without the help of the Father 
any more than a new-born babe could of itself live and 
grow to a man, yet in the giving of that help the very 
fatherhood of the Father finds it one gladsome labor ; 
for that the Lord came ; for that the world was made ; 
for that we were born into it ; for that God lives and 
loves like the most loving man or woman on earth, 
only infinitely more and in other ways and kinds be- 
sides, which we cannot understand ; and therefore to 
be a man is the soul of eternal jubilation. 

CLXXVI I. 

The tendency of the present age is to blot from the 
story of every-day life all reminders of the ordinary 
human relations, as commonplace and insignificant, 
and to mingle all society in one concourse of atoms 
in which the only distinctions shall be those of rank; 
whereas the sole power to keep social intercourse from 
growing stale, is the recognition of the immortal and 



162 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

true in all the simple human relations. Then we look 
upon all men with reverence, and find ourselves safe 
and at home in the midst of divine intents, which may- 
be violated and striven with, but can never be escaped, 
because the will of God is the very life and well-being 
of His creatures. 

CLXXVIII. 

Imagine a young fisherman meditating — as he wan- 
dered with bent head through the wilder woods on the 
steep banks of the burn, or the little green levels which 
it overflowed in winter — of all possible subjects, what 
analogy there might be twixt the body and the soul in 
respect of derivation — whether the soul was traduced 
as well as the body ! — as his material form came from 
the forms of his father and mother, did his soul come 
from their souls ? or did the Maker, as at the first he 
breathed His breath into the form of Adam, still, at 
some crisis unknown in its creation, breathe into each 
form the breath of individual being? If the latter 
theory were the true, then, be his earthly origin what 
it might, he had but to shuffle off this mortal coil to 
walk forth a clean thing, as a prince might cast off 
the rags of an enforced disguise, and set out for the 
land of his birth. If the former were the true, then 
the well-spring of his being was polluted, nor might 
he by any death fling aside his degradation, or show 



HUMANITY. 163 

himself other than defiled in the eyes of the old dwell- 
ers in " those high countries " where all things seem 
as they are, and are as they seem. 

One day when, these questions fighting in his heart, 
he had for the hundredth time arrived thus far, all at 
once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth 
of his soul, replied — 

" Even then — should the well-spring of thy life be 
polluted with vilest poisons such as, in Persian legends, 
the lips of the lost are doomed to drink with loathing 
inconceivable — the well is but the utterance of the 
water, not the source of its existence ; the rain is its 
father and comes from the sweet heavens. Thy soul, 
however it became known to itself, is from the pure 
heart of God, whose thought of thee is older than thy 
being — is its first and eldest cause. Thy essence can- 
not be defiled, for in Him it is eternal." 

Even with the thought the horizon of his life began 
to clear ; a light came out on the far edge of its 
ocean — a dull and sombre yellow, it is true, and the 
clouds hung yet heavy over sea and land, while miles 
of vapor hid the sky ; but he could now believe there 
might be a blue beyond, in which the sun lorded it 
with majesty. 

CLXXIX. 

It is the human we love in each other — and the 
human is the Christ. What we do not love is the 



164 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

devilish — no more the human than the morrow's 
wormy mass was the manna of God. To be for the 
Christ in a man is the highest love you can give him ; 
for in the unfolding alone of that Christ can the indi- 
viduality, the genuine peculiarity of the man, the man 
himself, he perfected, the flower of his nature be 
developed, in its own distinct loveliness, beauty, splen- 
dor, and brought to its idea. 

CLXXX. 

The thing that divided them was the original mis- 
understanding, which lies, deep and black as the pit 
between every soul and the soul next it, where self and 
not God is the final thought. The gulf is forever 
crossed by "bright shoots of everlastingness," the light- 
nings of involuntary affection ; but nothing less than 
the willed love of an infinite devotion will serve to 
close it; any moment it may be lighted up from be- 
neath and the horrible distance between them laid 
bare. Into this gulf it was that, with absolute gift 
of Himself, the Lord, doing like His Father, cast 
Himself ; and by such devotion alone can His disciples 
become fellow workers with* Him, help to slay the evil 
self in the world, and rouse the holy self to like sac- 
rifice that the true, the eternal life of men may arise 
jubilant and crowned. Then is the old man of claims, 



CONVERSION. 165 

and rights, and disputes, and fears re-born a child, whose 
are all things and who claims and fears nothing. 

clxxxi. 

Conscious, persistent wrong may harden and thicken 
the gauze to a quilted armor, but even through that 
the sound of its teeth may wake up Don Worm, the 
conscience, and then is the baser nature between the 
fell incensed points of mighty opposites. It avails a 
man little to say he does not believe this or that, if the 
while he cannot rest because of some word spoken. 
True speech, as well as true Scripture, is given by in- 
spiration of God ; it goes forth on the wind of the 
Spirit, with the ministry of fire. The sun will shine, 
and the wind will blow, the floods will beat, and the 
fire will burn, until the yielding soul re-born into child- 
hood, spreads forth its hands and rushes to the Father. 

CLXXXIL 

When people want to walk their own way without 
God, God lets them try it. And then the devil gets 
a hold of them. But God won't let him keep them. 
As soon as they are wearied in the " greatness of their 
way," they begin to look about for a Saviour. And 
then they find God ready to pardon, ready to help, 
not breaking the bruised reed — leading them on His 



166 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

own self manifest — with whom no man can fear any 
longer, Jesus Christ, the righteous lover of men — 
their Elder Brother — one to help them and take their 
part against the devil, the world, and the flesh, and 
all the rest of the wicked powers. So you see God 
is tender — just like the prodigal son's father — only 
with this difference, that God has millions of prodigals, 
and never gets tired of going out to meet them and 
welcome them back, every one as if He were the only 
prodigal son He had ever had. 

CLXXXIII. 

Wherever the water of life is received it sinks and 
softens and hollows, until it reaches, far down, the 
springs of life there also that come straight from the 
eternal hills, and thenceforth there is in that soul a 
well of water springing up into everlasting life. 

CLXXXIV. 

How many people would like to be good, if only 
they might be good without taking trouble about it. 
They do not like goodness well enough to hunger 
and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that 
they may buy it ; they will not batter at the gate of 
the kingdom of heaven ; but they look with pleasure 
on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and 



FRIENDSHIP. 167 

think it would be rather nice to live in it. They do 
not know that it is goodness all the time their very 
being is pining after, and that they are starving their 
nature of its necessary food. 

CLXXXV. 

One cannot help sometimes feeling that the only 
chance for certain persons is to commit some fault 
suffcient to shame them out of the self-satisfaction in 
which they burrow. A fault, if only it be great and 
plain enough to exceed their powers of self-justifica- 
tion, may then be, of God's mercy, not indeed an angel 
of light to draw them, but verily a goblin of darkness 
to terrify them out of themselves. 

CLXXXVI. 

Sometimes two persons are like two drops running 
alongside of each other down a window-pane : one mar- 
vels how it is they can so long escape running together. 
Persons fit to be bosom friends will meet and part 
for years, and never say much beyond " good-morning " 
and "good-night." 

CLXXXVII. 

Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him 



168 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

for help — a fact which points at a unity more delicate 
and close, and profound than heart has yet perceived. 
It is but "a modern instance " how a mother, if she 
be but a hen, becomes bold as a tigress for her perilled 
offspring. A stranger will fight for the stranger whp 
puts his trust in him. The most foolish of men will 
search his musty brain to find wise saws for his boy. 
An anxious man, going to his friend to borrow, may 
return having lent him instead. The man who has 
found nothing yet in the world save food for the hard 
sharp, clear intellect, will yet cast an eye around the 
universe to see if perchance there may not be a God 
somewhere for the hungering heart of his friend. 

CLXXXVIII. 

No one holds the truth, or can hold it, in one and 
the same thought but God. Our human life is often, 
at best, but an ossicillation between the extremes 
which together make the truth ; and it is not a bad 
thing in a family, that the pendulums of father and 
mother should differ in movement so far, that when 
the one is at one extremity of the swing, the other 
should be at the other, so that they meet only in the 
point of indifference, in the middle ; that the predomi- 
nant tendency of the one should not be the predomi- 
nant tendency of the other. 



HOME. 169 

CLXXXIX. 

The bond cannot be very close between father and 
child, when the father has forsaken his childhood. 
The bond between any two is the one in the other : 
it is the father in the child and the child in the father 
that reach to each other eternal hands. 

CXC. 

As the thought of water to the thirsty soul, for it is 
the soul far more than the body, that thirsts even for 
the material water, such is the thought of home to 
the wanderer in a strange country. As the weary soul 
pines for sleep, and every heart for the cure of its own 
bitterness, so my heart and soul had often pined for 
their home. Did I know, I asked myself, where or 
what that home was ? It could consist in no change 
of place or of circumstance ; no mere absence of care ; 
no accumulation of repose ; no blessed communion 
even with those whom my soul loved ; in the midst 
of it all I should be longing for a homelier home — 
one into which I might enter with a sense of infinitely 
more absolute peace than a conscious child could know 
in the arms, upon the bosom of his mother. In the 
closest contact of human soul with human soul, when 
all the atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again 
and yet again on the far horizon would the dim, lurid 



170 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

flame of unrest shoot for a moment through the en- 
chanted air, and Psyche would know that not yet had 
she reached her home. There is but one home for 
us all and when we find — in proportion as each of 
us finds — that home, shall we be gardens of delight 
to each other — little chambers of rest, galleries of 
pictures — wells of water. For what is this home ? 
God himself. His thoughts, His will, His love, His 
judgments, are man's home. To think His thoughts, 
to choose His will, to love His loves, to judge His 
judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with 
us, is to be at home. 

And to pass through the valley of the shadow of 
death is the way home, but only thus, that as all 
changes have hitherto led us nearer to this home, 
the knowledge of God, so this greatest of all outward 
changes — for it is but an outward change — will surely 
usher us into a region where there will be fresh possi- 
bilities of drawing nigh in heart, soul and mind to the 
Father of us. It is the father, the mother, that makes 
for the child his home. 

CXCI. 

The youth who thinks the world his oyster, and 
opens it forthwith, finds no pearl therein. 

What is this nimbus about the new ? Is the marvel 
a mockery ? Is the slime that of demon-gold ? No. 



HOME. r 7 i 

It is a winged glory that alights beside the youth ; and 
having gathered his eyes to itself, flits away to a fur- 
ther perch ; there alights, there shines, thither entices. 
With outstretched hands the child of earth follows, to 
fall weeping at the foot of the gray, disenchanted 
thing. But beyond and again beyond, shines the 
lapwing . of heaven — not, as a faithless generation 
thinks, to delude like them, but to lead the seeker 
home to the nest of the glory. 

CXCII. 

Is it necessary to admit that we must have had a 
conscious life before this life, to find meaning in the 
words — 

" But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home ? " 

Is not all the good in us His image ? Imperfect 
and sinful as we are, is not all the foundation of our 
being His image ? Is not the sin all ours, and the life 
in us all God's ? We cannot be the creatures of God, 
without partaking of His nature. Every motion of 
our conscience, every admiration of what is pure 
and noble, is a sign and result of this. Is not every 
self-accusation a proof of the presence of His spirit. 
That comes not of ourselves — that is not without 
Him, These are the clouds of glory we come trailing 
from Him. All feelings of beauty and peace and love- 



172 • CHEERFUL WORDS. 

liness and right and goodness, we trail with us from 
our home. God is the only home of the human soul. 

CXCIII. 

All that is physical is put, or is in the process of 
being put, under the feet of the spiritual. Do not mis- 
take me. I do not say you can make yourself merry 
or happy when you are in a physical condition which 
is contrary to such mental condition. But you can 
withdraw from it — not all at once; but by practice 
and effort, you can learn to withdraw from it, refusing 
to allow your judgments and actions to be ruled by 
it. You can climb up out of the fogs, and sit quiet 
in the sunlight on the hillside of faith. You cannot 
be merry down below in the fog, for there is the fog ; 
but you can, every now and then, fly with the dove- 
wings of the soul up into the clear, to remind yourself 
that all this passes away, is but an accident, and that 
the sun shines always, although it may not at any 
given moment be shining on you. " What does that 
matter ? " you will learn to say. " It is enough for me 
to know that the sun does shine, and that this is only 
a weary fog that is round about me for the moment. 
I shall come out into the light beyond, presently." 
This is faith — faith in God, who is the light, and is 
all in all. I believe that the most glorious instances 
of calmness in suffering, are thus achieved ; that the 



MOODS. 173 

sufferers really do not suffer what one of us would, 
if thrown into their physical condition, without the 
refuge of their spiritual condition as well ; for they 
have taken refuge in the inner chamber. Out of the 
spring of their life a power goes forth that quenches 
the flames of the furnace of their suffering, so far at 
least that it does not touch the deep life, cannot make 
them miserable, does not drive them from the posses- 
sion of their soul in patience, which is the divine 
citadel of* the suffering. 

CXCIV. 

In his hopeful moods, let a man put on his singing 
robes, and chant aloud the words of gladness to his 
fellows ■ in his hours of hopelessness, let him utter 
his thoughts only to his inarticulate violin, or in the 
evanescent sounds of any other stringed instrument ; 
let him commune with his own heart, on his bed, and 
be still ; let him speak to God face to face, if he 
may; — only he cannot do that and continue hopeless — 
but let him not sing aloud in such a mood into the 
hearts of his fellows, for he cannot do them much 
good thereby. If it were a fact that there is no hope, 
it would not be a truth. No doubt, if it were a fact, 
it ought to be known ; but who will dare be confident 
that there is no hope ? Therefore, I say, let the hope- 



174 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

less moods, at least, if not the hopeless men, be 
silent. 

cxcv. 

Many feelings are simply too good to last — using 
the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is 
generally used, expressing the conviction that God is 
a hard Father, fond of disappointing His children ; 
but to express the fact that intensity and endurance 
cannot yet co-exist in the human economy. But the 
virtue of a mood depends by no means on its imme- 
diate presence. Like any other experience, it may be 
believed in, and, in the absence which leaves the mind 
free to contemplate it, work even more good than in 
its presence. 

CXCVI. 

" There are many feelings in us that are not able to 
get up-stairs the moment we call them. Be as dull 
and stupid as it pleases God to let you be, and trouble 
neither yourself nor him about that, only ask Him to 
be with you all the same." 

Then the little man dropped on his knees by the 
bedside, and said : 

" O Lord Jesus, be near when it seems to us, as it 
seemed to Thee once, that our Father has forsaken 
us and gathered back to Himself all the gifts He 
once gave us. Even Thou who wast mighty in death, 



MOODS. 175 

didst need the presence of Thy Father to make Thee 
able to endure : forget not us, the work of Thy hands 
yea, the labor of Thy heart and spirit. Oh remember 
that we are His offspring, neither accountable for our 
being, nor able to comfort or strengthen ourselves. If 
Thou wert to leave us alone, we should cry out upon 
Thee as on the mother who threw her babes to the 
wolves — and there are no wolves able to terrify Thee. 
Ah Lord ! we know Thou leavest us not, only in our 
weakness we would comfort our hearts with the music 
of the words of faith. Thou canst not do other than 
care for us, Lord Christ, for whether we be glad or 
sorry, slow of heart or full of faith, all the same are 
we the children of Thy Father. He sent us here, and 
never asked us if we would ; therefore Thou must be 
with us, and give us repentance and humility and love 
and faith, that we may indeed be the children of Thy 
Father who is in heaven. Amen." 

CLXVII. 

Lord hear my discontent: All blank I stand, 

A mirror polished by Thy hand ; 

Thy sun's beams flash and flame from me — 

I cannot help it : here I stand, there he ; 

To one of them I cannot say, 

Go, and on yonder water play. 

Nor one poor ragged daisy can I fashion — 

I do not make the words of this my limping passian. 



176 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

If I should say, Now I will think a thought. 

Lo ! I must wait, unknowing, 

What thought in me is growing, 

Until the thing to birth is brought : 

Nor know I then what next will come 

From out the gulf of silence dumb. 

I am the door the thing did find 

To pass into the general mind ; 

I cannot say I think — 

I only stand upon the thought-well's brink ; 

From darkness to the sun the water bubbles up — 

I lift it in my cup. 

Thou ouly thinkest — I am thought ; 
Me and my thought Thou thinkest. Nought 
Am I but as a fountain spout 
From which Thy water welleth out. 
Thou art the only One, the All in all. 
—Yet when my soul on Thee doth call 
And Thou dost answer out of everywhere, 
I in Thy allness have my perfect share. 

CXCVIII. 

" Can you then imagine any good reason," said Drew, 
" why we should be kept in such absolute ignorance 
of everything that befalls the parted spirit from the 
moment it quits its house with us ? " 

" I think I know one," answered Polwarth. 

" I have sometimes fancied it might be because no 



THE OTHER LIFE. 177 

true idea of their condition could possibly be grasped 
by those who remain in the tabernacle of the body; 
that to know their state it is necessary that we also 
should be clothed in our new bodies, which are to the 
old as a house to a tent. I doubt if we have any 
words in which the new facts could be imparted to our 
knowledge, the facts themselves being beyond the reach 
of any senses whereof we are now in actual possession. 
I expect to find my new body provided with new, I mean 
other senses beyond what I now possess : many more 
may be required to bring us into relation with all the 
facts in himself which God may have shadowed forth 
in properties, as we say, of what we call matter? The 
spaces all around us, even to those betwixt star and star 
may be the home of the multitudes of the heavenly 
host, yet seemingly empty to all who have but our pro- 
vision of senses. But I do not care to dwell upon that 
kind of speculation. It belongs to a lower region, upon 
which I grudge to expend interest while the far loftier 
one invites me, where, if I gather not the special barley 
of which I am in search, I am sure to come upon the 
finest of wheat — well, then, for my reason : There are 
a thousand individual events in the course of every 
man's life, by which God takes a hold of him — a thou- 
sand breaches by which he could and does enter, little 
as the man may know it ; but there is one universal 
and unchanging grasp He keeps upon the race, yet 
not as the race, for the grasp is upon every solitary 



178 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

single individual that has a part in it : that grasp is — 
death in its mystery. To whom can the man who is 
about to die in absolute loneliness, and go he cannot 
tell whither, flee for refuge from the doubts and fears 
that assail him, but to the Father of his being ? " 

" But,", said Drew, " I cannot see what harm would 
come of letting us know a little — as much at least as 
might serve to assure us that there was more of some- 
thing on "The other side." 

" Just this," returned Polwarth, " that, their fears 
allayed, their hopes encouraged from any lower quarter, 
men would, as usual, turn away from the fountain to 
the cistern of life, from the ever fresh original creative 
Love to that drawn off and shut in. That there are 
thousands who would forget God if they could but be 
assured of such a tolerable state of things beyond the 
grave as even this wherein we now live, is plainly to be 
anticipated from the fact that the doubts of so many 
in respect of religion concentrate themselves nowadays 
upon the question whether there is any life beyond the 
grave ; a question which, although no doubt nearly as- 
sociated with religion — as what question worth asking 
is not ? — does not immediately belong to religion at 
all. Satisfy such people, if you can, that they shall 
live, and what have they gained ? A little comfort 
perhaps — but a comfort not from the highest source, 
and possibly gained too soon for their well-being. 
Does it bring them any nearer to God than they 



THE OTHER LIFE. 179 

were before ? Is He rilling one cranny more of their 
hearts in consequence ? Their assurance of immortal- 
ity has not come from a knowledge of Him, and without 
Him it is worse than worthless. Little indeed has been 
gained, and that with the loss of much. The word 
applies here which our Lord in His parable puts in the 
mouth of Abraham : If they hear not Moses and the 
prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose 
from the dead. He does not say they would not believe 
in a future state though one rose from the dead — al- 
though most likely they would soon persuade them- 
selves that the apparition after all was only an illusion 
— but that they would not be persuaded to repent, 
though one rose from the dead ; and without that, what 
great matter whether they believe in a future state or 
not ? It would only be the worse for them if they did. 
No, Mr. Drew ! I repeat, it is not a belief in immortality 
that will deliver a man from the woes of humanity, 
but faith in the God of life, the Father of lights, the 
God of all consolation and comfort. Believing in Him, 
a man can leave his friends, and their and his own 
immortality, with everything else —- even his and their 
love and perfection, with utter confidence in His hands. 
Until we have the life in us, we shall never be at peace. 
The living God dwelling in the heart He has made, 
and glorifying it by inmost speech with Himself — 
that is life, assurance and safety. Nothing less is or 
can be such." 



180 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CXCIX. 

What headquarters, what court of place and circum- 
stance should the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, hold? 
And yet if from Him flow time and space, although 
He cannot- be subject to them : if His Son could in- 
carnate Himself — cast the living, responsive, elastic, 
flowing, evanishing circumstance of a human garment 
around him ; if, as Novalis says, God can become 
whatever He can create, then may there not be some 
central home of God, holding relation even to time 
and space and sense ? But I am bewildered about it. 
— Jesus stood in the meeting point of both worlds, 
or rather in the skirts of the great world that infolds 
the less. I am talking like a baby, for my words can- 
not compass or even represent my thoughts. This 
world looks to us the natural and simple one, and so 
it is — absolutely fitted to our need and education. 
But there is that in us which is not at home in this 
world, which I believe holds secret relations with every 
star, or perhaps rather with that in the heart of God 
whence issued every star, diverse in kind and character 
as in color and place and motion and light. To that 
in us this world is so fai strange and unnatural and 
unfitting, and we need a yet homelier home. Yea, no 
home at last will do but the home of God's heart. 
Jesus, I say, was looking, on one side into the region 
of a deeper life where His people, those that knew 



THE OTHER LIFE. 181 

their own when they saw Him, would one day find 
themselves tenfold at home ; while, on the other hand, 
He was looking into the region of their present life, 
which custom and faithlessness makes them afraid to 
leave. But we need not fear what the new conditions 
of life will bring, either for body or heart ; they will 
be nearer and sweeter to our deeper being as Jesus is 
nearer and dearer than any man, because He is more 
human than any. He is all that we can love or look 
for, and at the root of that very loving and looking — 
" In my father's house are many mansions," He said. 
Matter, time, space, are all God's, and whatever may 
become of our philosophies, whatever He does with, or 
in respect of time, place, and what we call matter, His 
doing must be true in philosophy as well as fact. 



CC. 



" I wonder what I shall do the first thing when I 
find myself out of the body." 

" It does seem strange we should know so little of 
what is in some sense so near us that such a thin veil 
should be so impenetrable ! I fancy the first thing I 
should do would be to pray." 

" Then you think we shall pray there — wherever 
it is ? " 

" It seems to me as if I should go up in prayer the 
moment I got out of this dungeon of a body. I am 



1 82 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

wrong to call it a dungeon, for it lies open to God's 
fair world. Still it is a pleasant thought that it; will 
drop off me some day. But for prayer — I think all 
will pray there more than here — in their hearts and 
souls, I mean." 

" Then where would be the harm if you were to 
pray for me after I am gone ? " 

" Nowhere that I know. It were indeed a strange 
thing if I might pray for you up to the moment when 
you ceased to breathe, and therewith an iron gate 
closed between us, and I could not even reach you 
through the ear of the Father of us both ! It is a 
faithless doctrine, for it supposes either that those 
parted from us can do without prayer, the thing Jesus 
Himself could not do without, seeing it was His high- 
est joy, or that God has so parted those who are in Him 
from these who are not in Him, that there is no longer 
any relation, even with God, common to them. The 
thing to me takes the form of an absurdity." 

CCI. 

Wherein consists the essential inherent worthiness 
of a life as life ? The on!y perfect idea of life is — a 
unit, self-existent and creative. That is God, the only 
one. But to this idea, in its kind, must every life, to 
be complete as life, correspond ; and the human cor- 
respondence to self-existence is that the man should 



SIN. 183 

round and complete himself by taking into himself his 
origin, by going back and in his own will adopting 
that origin, rooting therein afresh in the exercise of 
his own freedom and in all the energy of his own self- 
roused will ; in other words, that the man say, ' I will 
be after the will of the creating /; " that he see and 
say with his whole being that to will the will of God 
in himself and for himself and concerning himself is 
the highest possible condition of a man. Then has he 
completed his cycle by turning back upon his history, 
laying hold of his cause, and willing his own being in 
the will of the only I AM. This is the rounding, re- 
creating, unifying of the man. This is religion : and 
all that gathers not with this scatters abroad. 

CCII. 

So long as a creature has not sinned, sin is possible 
to him. Does it seem inconsistent with trie character 
of God that in order that sin should become impossi- 
ble, He should allow sin to come ? that, in order that 
His creatures should choose the good and refuse the 
evil, in order that they might become such with their 
whole nature infinitely enlarged, as to turn from sin 
with a perfect repugnance of the will, He should allow 
them to fall, that in order that, from being sweet, child- 
ish children, they should become noble, child-like men 
and women, He should let them try to walk alone ? 



1 84 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Why should He not allow the possible in order that 
it should become impossible? for possible it would 
ever have been, even in the midst of all the blessed- 
ness until it had been, and had been thus destroyed. 
Thus sin is slain, uprooted. And the war must ever 
exist, it seems to me, where there is creation still 
going on. 

CCIII. 

A man may be oppressed by his sins, and hardly 
know what it is that oppresses him. There is more 
of sin in our burdens than we are ourselves aware. It 
needs not that we should have committed any grievous 
fault. Do we recognize in ourselves that which needs 
to be set right, that of which we ought to be ashamed, 
something which, were we lifted above all worldly anx- 
ieties, would yet keep us uneasy, dissatisfied, take 
the essential gladness out of the sunlight, make the 
fair face of* the earth indifferent to us, a trustful glance, 
a discomposing look, and death a darkness ? I say, 
to the man who feels thus, whatever he may have done 
or left undone, he is not so far from the kingdom of 
heaven but that he may enter thereinto if he will. 

CCIV. 

There was a time when I could not understand that 
he who loved not his brother was a murderer : now I 



SIN. 185 

see it to be no figure of speech, but, in the realities of 
man's moral and spiritual nature, an absolute simple 
fact. The murderer and the unloving sit on the same 
bench before the judge of eternal truth. The man 
who loves not his brother I do not say is at this 
moment capable of killing him, but if the natural 
working of his unlove be not checked, he will as- 
suredly become capable of killing him. Until we love 
our brother — yes, until we love our enemy, who is 
yet our brother — we contain within ourselves the 
undeveloped germ of murder. And so with every sin 
in the tables or out of the tables. We are very ready 
to draw in our minds a distinction between respectable 
sins — human imperfections we call them, perhaps — 
and disreputable vices, such as theft and murder ; but 
there is no such distinction in fact. The heavenly 
order goes upon other principles than ours, and there 
are first that shall be last, and last that shall be first. 
Only, at the root of all human bliss lies repentance. 

CCV. 

The marvelous man who appeared in Palestine, 
teaching and preaching, seems to have suffered far 
more from sympathy with the inward sorrows of His 
race than from pity for their bodily pains. These last 
could He not have swept from the earth with a word ? 
and yet it seems to have been mostly, if not indeed 



1 86 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

always, only in answer to prayer that he healed them, 
and that for the sake of some deeper, some spiritual 
healing that should go with the bodily cure. It could 
not be for the dead man whom He was about to call 
from the tomb that His tears flowed. What source 
could they have but compassion and pitiful sympathy 
for the sorrows of the dead man's sisters and friends 
who had not the inward joy that sustained Himself, 
and the thought of all the pains and heart-aches of 
those that looked in the face of death — the moanings 
of love-torn generations, the blackness of bereavement, 
that had stormed through the ever-changing world of 
human hearts since first man had been made in the 
image of His Father ? Yet are there far more terrible 
troubles than this death — which I trust can only part, 
not keep apart. There is the weight of conscious 
wrong-being and wrong-doing that is the gravestone 
that needs to be rolled away ere a man can rise to 
life. Call to mind how Jesus used to forgive men's 
sins, thus lifting from their hearts the crushing load 
that paralyzed all their efforts. Recall the tenderness 
with which He received those from whom the religious 
of His day turned aside — the repentant woman who 
wept sore-hearted from ,r ery love, the publicans who 
knew they were despised because they were despicable. 
With Him they sought and found shelter. He was 
their savior from the storm of human judgment and 
the biting frost of public opinion, even when that 



SIN. 187 

opinion and that judgment were re-echoed by the 
justice of their hearts. He received them, and the 
life within them rose up, and the light shone — the 
conscious light of life — despite even of shame and self- 
reproach. If God be for us who can be against us ? 

CCVI. 

They come to Thee, the halt, the maimed, the blind, 

The devil-torn, the sick, the sore ; 
Thy heart their well of life they find, 

Thine ear their open door. 

Ah ! who can tell the joy in Palestine — 
What smiles and tears of rescued throngs I 

Their leaves of life were turned to wine, 
Their prayers to shouts and songs ! 

The story dear our wise men fable call. 

Give paltry facts the mighty range ; 
To me it seems just what should fall, 

And nothing very strange. 

But were I deaf and lame and blind and sore, 

I scarce would care for cure to ask ; 
Another prayer should haunt Thy door — 

Set Thee a harder task. 

If Thou art Christ, see here this heart of mine, 

Torn, empty, moaning and unblest ! 
Had ever heart more need of Thine, 

If Thine indeed hath rest ? 



188 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Thy word, Thy hand, right soon did scare the bane 
That in their bodies death did breed ; 

If Thou canst cure my deeper pain, 
Then art Thou Lord indeed. 



CCVII. 

A doubter is not without faith. The very fact that 
he doubts shows that he has some faith. When I 
find any one hard upon doubters, I always doubt the 
quality of his faith. It is of little use to have a great 
cable, if the hemp is so poor that it breaks like the 
painter of a boat. I have known people whose power 
of believing chiefly consisted in their incapacity for 
seeing difficulties. Of what fine sort of faith must be 
that which is founded in stupidity, or far worse,, in- 
difference to the truth, and the mere desire to get out 
of hell! That is not a grand belief in the Son of 
God, the radiation of the Father. We get a glimpse 
of Thomas's want of faith in the grumbling, self- 
pitying way in which he said, " Let us also go that we 
may die with Him." His Master had said that He 
was going to wake Lazarus. Thomas said, " that we 
may die with Him." You may say, " he did not under- 
stand Him." True, it may be, but his unbelief was 
the cause of his not understanding Him. I suppose 
Thomas meant this as a reproach to Jesus for putting 
them all in danger by going back to Judaga ; if not it 



DOUBT. 189 

was only a poor piece of sentimentality. So much for 
Thomas's unbelief. But he had good and true faith 
notwithstanding ; for he went with his Master. 

CCVIII. 

A great part of the doubt in the world comes from 
the fact that there are in it so many more of the 
impossible, as compared with the originating minds. 
Where the openness to impression is balanced by the 
power of production, the painful questions of the 
world are speedily met by their answers ; where such 
is not the case, there are often long periods of suf- 
fering. Hence the need for every impressible mind 
to be by reading or speech, held in living association 
with an original mind, able to combat those sugges- 
tions of doubt and even unbelief, which the look of 
things must often occasion — a look which comes from 
our inability to gain other than fragmentary visions 
of the work that the Father worketh hitherto. 

CCIX. 

O Lord ! if on the wind at cool of day, 

I heard one whispered word of mighty grace ; 

If through the darkness, as in bed I lay, 
But once had come a hand upon my face ; 



190 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

If but one sign that might not be mistook, 
Had ever been, since first Thy face I sought, 

I should not now be doubting o'er a book, 

But serving Thee with burning heart and thought. 

So dreams that heart. But to my heart I say, 
« Turning my face to front the dark and wind ; 

Such signs had only barred anew His way 
Into thee, longing heart, thee, wildered mind. 

They asked the very Way, where lies the way; 

The very Son, where is the Father's face ; 
How He could show Himself, if not in clay, 

Who was the Lord of Spirit, form and space ? 

My being, Lord, will nevermore be whole 

Until Thou come behind mine ears and eyes, 

Enter and fill the temple of my soul 

With perfect contact — such a sweet surprise — 

Such presence as, before it met the view, 
The prophet fancy could not once foresee, 

Though every corner of the temple knew 
By very emptiness its need of Thee. 

When I keep all Thy words, no favored some — 
Heedless of worldly winds or judgment's tide, 
Then, Jesus, Thou wilt with Thy Father come — 

ended prayers I — and in my soul abide. 

Ah 1 long delay ! ah ! cunning, creeping sin ; 

1 shall but fail and cease at length to try ; 
O Jesus 1 though Thou wilt not yet come in, 

Knock at my window as Thou passest by. 



DOUBT. 191 

ccx. 

What if, after all the discoveries made, and all the 
theories set up and pulled down, amid all the common- 
places men call common sense, notwithstanding all the 
overpowering and excluding self-assertion of things 
that are seen, ever cryihg, " Here we are, and save 
us there is nothing: the Unseen is the Unreal!" — 
what if, I say, notwithstanding all this, it should yet 
be that the strongest weapon a man can wield, is 
prayer to one who made him ! What if the man who 
lifts up his heart to the unknown God even, be en- 
tering, amid the mockery of men who worship what 
they call natural law and science, into the region 
whence issues every law, and where the very material 
of science is born ! 

" From that moment," said Polwarth, " I was a stu- 
dent, a disciple. Soon to me also came the two ques- 
tions : How do I know that there is a God at all 1 and 
How am I to know that such a man as Jesus ever lived ? 
I could answer neither. But in the meantime I was read- 
ing the story — was drawn to the man there presented, 
and was trying to understand His being, and character, 
and principles of life and action. And, to sum all 
in a word, many months had not passed ere I had for- 
gotten to seek an answer to either question : they were 
in fact questions no longer : I had seen the man Jesus 
Christ, and in Him had known the Father of Him 



192 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

and of me. No conviction can be got, or if it could 
be got, would be of any sufficing value, through that 
dealer in second-hand goods, the intellect. If by it 
we could prove there is a God, it would be of small 
avail indeed : we must see Him and know Him, to 
know that He was not a demon. But I know no other 
way of knowing that there is a God but that which 
reveals what He is — the only idea that could be God 
— shows Him in his own self-proving existence — and 
that way is Jesus Christ as He revealed himself on 
earth, and as He is revealed afresh to every heart that 
seeks to know the truth concerning Him. 

" Either the whole frame of existence, is a wretched, 
miserable unfitness, a chaos with dreams of a world, 
a chaos in which the higher is forever subject to the 
lower, or it is an embodied idea growing towards per- 
fection in Him who is the one perfect creative Idea, 
the Father of lights, who suffers Himself that He 
may bring His many sons into the glory which is His 
own glory." 

, CCXI. 

Yes, master, when Thou comest Thou shalt find 

A little faith on earth, if I am here ! 
Thou know'st how oft I turn to Thee my mind 

How sad I wait until Thy face appear I 

Hast Thou not plowed my thorny ground full sore 
And from it gathered many stones and shreds, 



WORSHIP. 193 

Plow, plow and harrow till it needs no more — 
Then sow Thy mustard-seed, and send Thy birds. 

I love Thee, Lord ! and if I yield to fears, 

Nor trust with triumph that pale doubt defies, 

Remember, Lord, 'tis nigh two thousand years, 
And I have never seen Thee with mine eyes. 

And when I lift them from the wondrous tale, 
See all about me hath so strange a show ! 

Is that Thy river running down the vale ? 

Is that Thy wind that through the pines doth blow I 

Could'st Thou right verily appear again, 
The same who walked the paths of Palestine, 

And here in England teach Thy trusting men, 
In church and field and house with sword and sign. 

Here are but lilies, sparrows, and the rest 
My hands on some dear proof would light and stay ! 

But my heart sees John leaning on Thy breast, 
And sends them forth to do what Thou dost say. 

CCXII. 

"Is the child," said Polwarth "who sits by his 
father's knee and looks up into his father's face, 
serving that father because the heart of the father 
delights to look down upon his child ? And shall the 
moment of my deepest repose and bliss, the moment 
when I serve myself with the very life of the universe, 



194 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

be called a serving of my God ? It is communion with 
God ; He holds it with me else never could I hold it 
with Him. I am as the foam-froth upon His infinite 
ocean, but of the water of the ocean is the bubble on 
its waves. 

"When my child would serve me," he went on, "he 
spies out some need I have, springs from his seat at 
my knee, finds that which will meet my necessity, and 
is my eager, happy servant, of consequence in his own 
eyes inasmuch as he has done something for his father. 
His seat by my knee is love, delight, well-being, peace 
— not service, however pleasing in my eyes. 'Why 
do you seat yourself at my knee, my son ? ' 'To please 
you, father.' ' Nay, then my son ! go from me, and 
come again when it shall be to please thyself.' ' Why 
do you cling to my chair, my daughter ? ' ' Because I 
want to be near you, father. It makes me so happy ! ' 
' Come nearer still — come to my bosom, my child, 
and be yet happier.' Talk not of public worship as 
divine service ; it is a mockery. Search the prophets, 
and you will find the observances, fasts and sacrifices 
and solemn feasts of the temple, by them regarded 
with loathing and scorn just because by the people 
they were regarded as divine service." 

"But," said Mr. Drew, while Wingfold turned to- 
wards him with some anxiety lest he should break the 
mood of the little prophet, " I can't help thinking I 



WORSHIP. 195 

have you ; for how are poor creatures like us — weak, 
blundering creatures, sometimes most awkward when 
best intentioned — how are we to minister to a perfect 
God — perfect in wisdom, strength, and everything — 
of whom Paul says that He is not worshipped with 
men's hands as though He needed anything? I can- 
not help thinking that you are fighting merely with a 
word. Certainly, if the phrase ever was used in that 
sense, there is no meaning of the kind attached to 
it now : it stands merely for the forms of public 
worship." 

" Were there no such thing as divine service in the 
true sense of the word, then indeed it would scarcely 
be worth while to quarrel with its misapplication. But 
I assert that true and genuine service may be rendered 
to the living God ; and for the development of the 
divine nature in man, it is necessary that he should 
do something for God. Nor is it hard to discover how ; 
for God is in every creature that He has made, and 
in their needs He is needy, and in all their afflic- 
tions He is afflicted. Therefore Jesus says that what- 
ever is done to one of His little ones is done to Him. 
And if the soul of a man be the temple of the Spirit, 
then is the place of that man's labor — his shop, his 
counting-house, his laboratory — the temple of Jesus 
Christ, where the spirit of the man is incarnate in 
work." 



196 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCXIII. 

Methought that in a solemn church I stood. 

Its marble acres, worn with knees and feet, 

Lay spread from door to door, from street to street 

Midway the form hung high upon the road 

Of Him who gave His life to be our good : 

Beyond, priests flitted, bowed and murmured meet 

Among the candles shining still and sweet. 

Men came and went, and worshipped as they could, 

And still their dust a woman with her broom, 

Bowed to her work, kept sweeping to the door, 

Then saw I, slow through all the pillared gloom, 

Across the church a silent figure come : 

" Daughter," it said, " thou sweepest well my floor I " 

It is the Lord, I cried, and saw no more. 

CLXXIV. 

The world is full of beautiful things, but God has 
saved many men, from loving the mere bodies of them, 
by making them poor; and more still by reminding 
them that if they be as rich as Croesus all their lives, 
they will be as poor as Diogenes — poorer, without 
even a tub — when this world with all its pictures, 
scenery and books shall have vanished away. 

If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease 
to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the pas- 
sion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the 
hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant pres- 



BEAUTY. i 97 

ence of them would occasion. To compare great 
things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles 
break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same 
holy reason, in the degree of its application to them, 
for which the Lord withdrew from His disciples and 
ascended again to His Father — that the Comforter, 
the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things might come to 
them and abide with them, and so, the Son return, and 
the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveli- 
ness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only 
treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and 
gather, and fill hands and baskets from a mere desire 
of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same 
in kind, however harmless in mode, and degree, and 
object, as the avarice of the miser. Therefore God, 
that we may always have them, and ever learn to love 
their beauty, and yet more their truth, sends the benefi- 
.cent winter that we may think about what we have lost, 
and welcome when they come again, with greater ten- 
derness and love, with clearer eyes to see, and purer 
hearts to understand, the Spirit that dwells in them. 

CCXV. 

" Well, sir." said the old sexton's wife, " she be a 
bee-utiful old church. Some things, I think, sir, grows 
more beautiful the older they grows ! But it ain't 
us, sir." 



198 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

"I'm not so sure of that," I said. "What do you 
mean ? " 

" Well, sir, there's my little grandson in the cottage 
there ; he'll never be so beautiful again. Them child- 
ren du be the loves. But we all grows uglier as we 
grows older. Churches don't seem too, sir." 

" I'm not so sure about all that," I said again. 

"They did say, sir, that I was a pretty girl once. 
I'm not much to look at now." 

And she smiled with such a gracious amusement 
that I felt at once that if there was any vanity left in 
memory of her past loveliness, it was as sweet as the 
memory of their old fragrance left in the withered 
leaves of the roses. 

" But it du not matter, du it, sir ? Beauty is only 
skin-deep." 

" I don't believe that," I answered. Beauty is as 
deep as the heart, at least." 

" Well, to be sure, my old husband du say I be as 
handsome in his eyes as ever I be. But I beg your 
pardon sir, for talkin about myself. I believe it was 
the old church — she set us on to it." 

"The old church didn't lead you into any harm, 
then," I answered. " The beauty that is in the heart 
will shine out of the face again some day — be sure 
of that. And after all, there is just the same kind of 
beauty in a good old face that there is in an old 



BEAUTY. 199 

church. You can't say the church is so trim and neat 
as it was the day that the first blast of the organ 
filled it as with a living soul. The carving is not quite 
so sharp, the timbers are not quite so clean. There 
is a good deal of mould and worm-eating and cobwebs 
about the old place. Yet both you and I think it 
more beautiful now than it was then. Well, I believe 
it is, as nearly as possible, the same with an old face. 
It has got stained and weather-beaten and worn ; but 
if the organ of truth has been playing on inside the 
temple of the Lord, which St. Paul says our bodies 
are, there is in the old face, though both form and 
complexion are gone, just the beauty of the music 
inside. The wrinkles and the brownness can't spoil 
it. A light shines through it all — that of the in- 
dwelling spirit. I wish we all grew old like the old 
churches." 

CCXVI 

In some regions beauty must be looked for below 
the surface. There is a probability of finding hollows 
of repose, sunken spots of loveliness, hidden away 
altogether from the general aspect of sternness or 
perhaps sterility, that meets the eye in glancing over 
the outspread landscape ; just as in the natures of 
stern men, you may expect to find, if opportunity 
should be afforded you, sunny spots of tender verdure, 



200 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

kept ever green by that very sternness, which is turned 
towards the common gaze — thus existent because they 
are below the surface, and not laid bare to the sweep 
of the cold winds that roam over the world. How 
often have not men started with amaze at the dis- 
covery of some feminine sweetness, some grace of 
protection in the man whom they had indeed thought 
cold and hard and rugged, inaccessible to the more 
genial influences of humanity ! It may be that such 
men are only fighting against the wind, and keep their 
hearts open to the sun. 

CCXVII. 

Show a beautiful picture, one full of quiet imagina- 
tion and deep thought, to a common-minded man ; he 
will pass it by with some slight remark, thinking it 
very ordinary and commonplace. That is because he 
is commonplace. Because our minds are so common- 
place, have so little of the divine imagination in them, 
therefore we do not recognize the spiritual meaning 
and worth, we do not perceive the beautiful will of 
God, in the things required of us, though they are full 
of it. But if we do them we shall thus make acquaint- 
ance with them, and come to see what is in them. 
The roughest kernel amongst them has a tree of life 
in its heart. 



BEAUTY. 201 

CCXVIII. 

" Not much of weather for your sacred craft, Perci- 
vale," I said to the artist, as he entered. " I suppose 
if you were asked to make a sketch to-day it would be 
much the same as if a stupid woman were to ask you 
to take her portrait." « 

" Not quite so bad as that," said Percivale. " Surely 
the human face is more than nature." 
" Nature is never stupid." 
" The woman might be pretty." 
" Nature is full of beauty in her worst moods ; while 
the prettier such a woman, the more stupid she would 
look, and the more irksome you would feel the task, 
for you could not help making claims upon her which 
you would never think of making upon nature." 

" I dare say you are right. Such stupidity has a 
good deal to do with moral causes. You do not ever 
feel that nature is to blame." 

" Nature is never ugly. She may be dull, sorrowful, 
troubled : she may be lost in tears and pallor, but she 
cannot be ugly. It is only when you rise into animal 
nature that you find ugliness." 

" True in the main only ; for no lines of absolute 
division can be drawn in nature ; I have seen ugly 
flowers." 

" I grant it. But they are exceptional. And none 
of them are without beauty." 



202 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

" Surely not. The ugliest soul is not without some 
beauty. But I grant you that the higher you rise, the 
more is ugliness possible, just because the greater 
beauty is possible. There is no ugliness to equal in 
repulsiveness the ugliness of a beautiful face." 

CCXIX. 

We are so easily affected by the smallest things that 
are of the unpleasant kind, that we ought to train 
ourselves to the influence of those that are of an 
opposite nature. The unpleasant ones are like the 
thorns which make themselves felt as we scramble — 
for we often do scramble in a very undignified manner 
through the thickets of life ; and feeling the thorns, 
we grumble, and are blind to all but the thorns. The 
flowers and the lovely leaves, and the red berries, and 
the clusters of filberts, and the birds' nests, do not 
force themselves upon our attention as the thorns do, 
and the thorns make us forget to look for them. But 
a scratch would be forgotten — and that in mental 
hurts is often equivalent to a^ cure, for a forgotten 
scratch on the mind or heart will never fester — if 
we but allowed our being a moment's repose upon any 
of the quiet, waiting unobtrusive beauties that lie 
around the half-trodden way, offering their gentle heal- 
ing. And when I think how, not unfrequently, other- 



BEAUTY. 203 

wise noble characters are anything but admirable 
when under the influence of trifling irritations, the 
very paltriness of which seems what the mind, which 
would at once rouse itself to a noble endurance of 
any mighty evil, is unable to endure, I would gladly 
help so with sweet antidotes to defeat the fly in the 
ointment of the apothecary that the whole pot shall 
send forth a pure savor. We ought for this to culti- 
vate the friendship of little things. Beauty is one of 
the surest antidotes to vexation. Often when life 
looked dreary about me, from some real or fancied 
injustice or indignity, has a thought of truth been 
flashed into my mind from a flower, a shape of frost, 
or even a lingering shadow — not to mention such 
glories as angel-winged clouds, rainbows, stars and 
sunrises. 

ccxx. • 

The tide had filled thousands of hollows in the 
breakwater, hundreds of cracked basins in the rocks, 
huge sponges of sand ; from all of which — from 
cranny and crack and oozing sponge — the water 
flowed in restricted haste back, back to the sea, tumb- 
ling in tiny cataracts down the faces of the rocks, bub- 
bling from their roots as from wells, gathering in 
tanks of sand, and overflowing in broad shallow 
streams, curving and sweeping in their sandy channels 



204 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

just like the great rivers of a continent ; — here spread- 
ing into smooth, silent lakes and reaches, here bab- 
bling along in ripples and waves innumerable — flow- 
ing, flowing, to lose their small beings in the same 
ocean that met on the other side the waters of the 
Mississippi, the Orinoco, the Amazon. All their chan- 
nels were of golden sand, and the golden sunlight was 
above and through and in them all : gold and gold 
met, with the waters between. And what gave an 
added life to their motion was that all the ripples 
made shadows on the clear yellow below them. The 
eye could not see the rippling on the surface ; but the 
sun saw it, and drew it in multitudinous shadowy mo- 
tion upon the sand, with the play of a thousand fan- 
cies of gold burnished and dead, of sunlight and 
yellow, trembling, melting, curving, blending, vanishing 
ever, ever renewed. It was as if all the water-marks 
upon a web of golden silk had been set in wildest, 
yet most graceful curvilinear motion by. the breath of 
a hundred playful zephyrs. My eye could not be filled 
with seeing. I stood in speechless delight for awhile 
gazing at the " endless ending," which was the ' humor 
of the game," and thinking how in all God's works 
the laws of beauty are wrought out in evanishment, in 
birth and death. There, there is no hoarding, but an 
ever-fresh creating, an eternal flow of life from the 
heart of the All-beautiful. 



OBEDIENCE. 205 

CCXXI. 

Whereas in former times the name Christ had been 
to the curate little more than a dull theological symbol, 
the thought of Him and of His thoughts were now 
constantly with him ; ever and anon some fresh light 
would break from the cloudy halo that enwrapped His 
grandeur ; ever was he growing more the Son of Man 
to his loving heart, ever more the Son of God to his 
aspiring spirit. Testimony had merged almost in vis- 
ion ; he saw into, and partly understood, the perfection 
it presented : he looked upon the face of God and lived. 
Oftener and oftener, as the days passed, did it seem 
as if the man were by his side, and at times, in the 
stillness of the summer eve, when he walked alone, it 
seemed almost as thoughts of revealing arose in his 
heart, that the Master himself was teaching him in 
spoken words. What need now to rack his soul in 
following the dim-seen, ever-vanishing paths of meta- 
physics ? He had but to obey the prophet of life, the 
man whose being and doing and teaching were blended 
in one three-fold harmony — or, rather, were the three- 
fold analysis of one white essence — he had but to obey 
Him, haunt His footsteps, and hearken after the sound 
of His spirit, and all truth would in healthy process be 
unfolded in Himself. What philosophy could carry him 
where Jesus could carry His obedient friends — into 



2o6 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

His own peace, namely, far above all fear and all hate, 
where his soul should breathe such a high atmosphere 
of strength at once, and repose, that he should love 
even his enemies, and that with no such love as conde- 
scendingly overlooks, but with the real, hearty, and 
self-involved affection that would die to give them the 
true life ! Alas ! how far was he from such perfection 
now — from such a martyrdom, lovely as endless, in 
the consuming fire of God ! And at the thought he fell 
from the heights of his contemplation — but was caught 
in the thicket of prayer. 

CCXXII. 

More even than a knowledge of the truth, is a readi- 
ness to receive it ; and Janet saw from the first that Gib- 
bie's ignorance at its worst was but room vacant for the 
truth : when it came, it found bolt nor bar on door or 
window, but had immediate entrance. The secret of 
this power of reception was, that to see a truth and to 
do it was one and the same thing with Gibbie. To 
know and not do would have seemed to him an impos- 
sibility, as it is in vital idea a monstrosity. 

CCXXIII. 

Being in the light Janet understood the light, and 



OBEDIENCE. 207 

had no need of system, either true or false, to explain 
it to her. She lived by the word proceeding out of the 
mouth of God. When life ' begins to speculate upon 
itself, I suspect it has begun to die. 

CCXXIV. 

It is infinitely better to think wrong and to act right 
upon that wrong thinking, than it is to think right and 
not to do as that thinking requires of us. In the for- 
mer case the man's house, if not built upon the rock, 
at least has the rock beneath it ; in the latter, it is 
founded on nothing but sand. The former man may 
be a Saul of Tarsus ; the latter a Judas Iscariot. He 
who acts right, will soon think right; he who acts 
wrong will soon think wrong. Any two persons acting 
faithfully upon opposite convictions, are divided but 
by a bowing wall ; any two, in belief most harmonious, 
who do not act upon it, are divided by infinite gulfs 
of the blackness of darkness, across which neither 
ever beholds the real self of the other. 

CCXXV. 

We are bound to obey the truth, and that to the 
full extent of our knowledge thereof, however little that 
may be. This obligation acknowledged and obeyed, 



208 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

the road is open to all truth — and the only road. The 
way to know is to do the known. 

CCXXVI. 

He who gladly kneels with one who thinks largely 
wide from himself, in so doing draws nearer to the 
Father of both than he who pours forth his soul in 
sympathetic torrent only in the company of those who 
think like himself. If a man be of the truth, then and 
only then, is he of those who gather with the Lord. 

CCXXVII. 

Human words at least, however it may be with some 
high heavenly language, can never say the best things 
but by a kind of stumbling, wherein one contradiction 
keepeth another from falling. No man can rid him 
of himself and live, for that involveth an impossibility. 
But he can rid himself of that haunting shadow of his 
own self, which he hath pampered and fed upon shad- 
owy lies, until it is bloated and black with pride and 
folly. When that demon-king of shades is once cast 
out, and the man's house is possessed of God instead, 
then first he findeth his true, substantial self, which is 
the servant, nay, the child of God. To rid thee of 
thyself, thou must offer it again to Him that made it. 
Be thou empty that He may fill thee. 



SELF EXAMINA TION. 209 

CCXXVIII. 

While one's good opinion of himself remains un- 
troubled, confesses no touch, gives out no hollow 
sound, shrinks not self-hurt with the doubt of its own 
reality, hostile criticism will not go very deep, will not 
reach to the quick. The thing that hurts is that 
which sets trembling the ground of self-worship, lays 
bare the shrunk cracks and worm-holes under the 
golden plates of the idol, shows the ants running about 
in it, and renders the foolish smile of the thing hate- 
ful. But he who will then turn away from his imag- 
ined self and refer his life to the hidden ideal self, the 
angel that ever beholds the face of the Father, shall 
therein be made whole and sound, alive and free. 

CCXXIX. 

All a man can do in the matter of judgment is to 
lead his fellow-man, if so he can, up to the judgment 
of God. He must never dare judge him for himself. 
If thou canst not tell whether thou didst well or ill 
in what thou didst, thou shouldst not vex thy soul. 
God is thy refuge — even from the wrongs of thine 
own judgment. Pray to Him to let thee know the 
truth, that if needful thou mayst repent. Be patient 
and not sorrowful until He show thee. Nor fear that 
He will judge thee harshly, because He must judge 



210 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

thee truly. That were to wrong God. Trust in Him, 
even when thou fearest wrong in thyself, for He will 
deliver thee therefrom. 

ccxxx. 

How difficult it is to make prevalent the right notion 
of anything ! But only a little reflection is required to 
explain the fact. The cause is, that so few people give 
themselves the trouble to understand what is told them. 
The first thing suggested by the words spoken is taken 
instead of the fact itself, and to that as a ground-plan, 
all that follows is fitted. People listen so badly, even 
when not sleepily, that the wonder is anything of con- 
sequence should ever be even approximately under- 
stood. How appalling it would be to one anxious, to 
convey a meaning, to see the shapes of his words as- 
sumed in the mind of his listening friend ! For, in 
place of falling upon the table of his perception, kept 
steady by will and judgment, he would see them tumble 
upon the sounding board of his imagination, ever vi- 
brating, and there be danced, like sand, into all manner 
of shapes, according to the tune played by the capri- 
cious instrument. 

CCXXXI. 

Depth to some is indicated by gloom, and affection 
by a persistent brooding — as if there were not horn- 



HOPEFULNESS. 2 1 1 

age to the past of love save sighs and tears. When 
they meet a man whose eyes shine, whose step is light, 
on whose lips hovers a smile, they shake their heads 
and say, " There goes one who has never loved, and 
who therefore knows not sorrow." But such a man 
is one of those over whom death has no power ; whom 
time nor space can part from those he> loves ; who lives 
in the future more than in the past ! Has not his 
being ever been for the sake of that which was yet 
to come ? Is not his being now for the sake of that 
which it shall be ? Has he not infinitely more to do 
with the great future than the little past ? The Past 
has descended into hell, is even now ascending glori- 
fied, and will, in returning cycle, ever and again greet 
our faith as the more and yet more radiant Future. 

CCXXXII. 

We are saved by hope. Never man hoped too much, 
or repented that he had hoped. The plague is, that 
we don't hope in God half enough. The very fact 
that hope is strength, and strength the outcome, the 
body of life, shows that hope is at one with life, with 
the very essence of what says " I am" — yea, of what 
doubts and says " Am I ? " — and therefore is reason- 
able to creatures who can not even doubt save in 
that they live. 



212 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCXXXIII. 

There is a strange delight in motion, which I am not 
sure that I altogether understand. The hope of the 
end as bringing fresh enjoyment has something to do 
with it, no doubt ; the accompaniments of the motion, 
the change of scene, the mystery that lies beyond the 
next hill, or the next turn in the road, the breath of 
the summer wind, the scent of the pine trees, especi- 
ally, and of all the earth, the tinkling jangle of the 
harness as you pass the trees on the roadside, the life 
of the horses, the glitter and shadow, the cottages and 
the roses and the rosy faces, the scent of burning wood 
or peat from the chimneys — these and a thousand 
other things combine to make such a journey delight- 
ful. But I believe it needs something more than this 
— something even closer to the human life — to ac- 
count for the pleasure that motion gives us. I suspect 
it is its living symbolism ; the hidden relations which 
it bears to the eternal soul in its aspirations and long- 
ings — ever following after, ever attaining, never satis- 
fied. Do not misunderstand me. A man, you will 
allow, perhaps, may be content although he is not 
and cannot be happy : I feel inclined to turn all this 
the other way, saying that a man ought always to be 
happy, never to be content. You will see I do not 
say contented; I say content. Here comes in his 
faith : his life is hid with trust in God, measureless, 



HOPEFULNESS. 213 

unbounded. All things are his, to become his by 
blessed, lovely gradations of gift as his being en- 
larges to receive ; and if ever the shadow of his own 
necessary incompleteness falls upon the man, he has 
only to remember that in God's idea he is complete, 
only his life is hid from himself with Christ in God 
the Infinite. 

CCXXXIV. 

The most presumptuous thing in the world is to 
pronounce on the possible and the impossible. I do 
not know what is possible and what is impossible. I 
can only tell a little of what is true and what is untrue. 
I get peeps now and then into the condition of my 
own heart, which, for the moment, make it seem im- 
possible that I should ever rise into a true state of 
nature — that is, into the simplicity of God's will con- 
cerning me. The only hope for ourselves and others 
lies in Him — in the power the creating Spirit has 
over the spirits He has made. 

ccxxxv. 



I fancy I hear a whisper 
As of leaves in a gentle air: 
Is it wrong, I wonder to fancy 
It may be the Tree up there ? 



214 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

The Tree that healeth the nations, 
Growing amidst the street, 
And dropping for who will gather, 
Its apples at their feet ? 

I fancy I hear a rushing 

As of waters down a slope, 

Is it wrong, I wonder, to fancy 

It may be the river of hope ? 

The river of crystal waters 

That flows from the very throne, 

And runs through the street of the city 

With a softly jubilant tone ? 

I fancy a twilight round me, 

And a wandering of the breeze,' 

With a hush in that high city, 

And a shadow among the trees. 

But I know there will be no night there — 

No coming and going day; 

For the holy face of the Father 

Will be perfect light alway. 

I should seek, I should care, for nothing, 
Beholding His countenance ; 
And fear but to lose one glimmer 
By one single sideway glance, 
Come to me, shine on me, Master, 
And I care not for river or tree — 
Care for no sorrow or crying 
If only Thou shine in me. 



HOPEFULNESS. 215 

CCXXXVI. 

Whatever belongs to God is essential to God. He 
is one pure, clean essence of being, to use our poor 
words to describe the indescribable. Nothing hangs 
about Him that does not belong to Him — that He 
could part with and be nothing the worse. Still less 
is there anything He could part with and be the worse. 
Whatever belongs to Him is of His own kind, is part 
of Himself, so to speak. Therefore there is nothing 
indifferent to His character to be found in Him ; and 
therefore when our Lord says not a sparrow falls to 
the ground without our Father, that, being a fact 
with regard to God, must be an essential fact — one, 
namely, without which He could be no God. 

CCXXXVII. 

It was a cold evening in the middle of November. 
The light which had been scanty enough all day, had 
vanished in a thin penetrating London fog. Round 
every lamp in the street was a colored halo ; the gay 
shops gleamed like jewel-caverns of Aladdin hollowed 
out of the darkness ; and the people that hurried or 
sauntered along looked inscrutable. Where could they 
live ? Had they anybody to love them ? Were their 
hearts quiet under their dingy cloaks and shabby 
coats ? 



216 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

What would not one give for a peep into the mys- 
teries of all these worlds that go crowding past us ! 
If we could but see through the opaque husk of them, 
some would glitter and glow like diamond mines ; 
others, perhaps, would look mere earthy holes ; some 
of them forsaken quarries, with a great pool of stag- 
nant water in the bottom ; some like vast coal-pits of 
gloom, into which you dared not carry a lighted lamp 
for fear of explosion. Some would be mere lumber- 
rooms ; others, ill-arranged libraries, without a poet's 
corner anywhere. But what a wealth of creation they 
show, and what infinite room for hope it affords ! 

Be sure of this, that as the Father is keen-eyed, for 
the evil in His creatures to destroy it, He would if 
it were possible, be yet keener-eyed for the good to 
nourish and cherish it. 

CCXXXVIII. 

I am certain you cannot do people good by showing 
them only the painful. Make your pictures as painful 
as you will but put some hope into them, something 
to show that action is worth taking in the affair. 
From mere suffering people will turn away, and you 
cannot blame them. Every show of it, without hint- 
ing at some door of escape, only urges them to forget 
it all. Why should they be pained if it can do no 
good ? 



HOPEFULNESS. 217 

CCXXXIX. 

Oh, the love of the Son of Man, who in the midst 
of all the wretched weaknesses of those who sur- 
rounded Him, loved the best in them, and looked 
forward to His own victory for them, that they might 
become all that they were meant to be — like Him; 
that the lovely glimmerings of truth and love that 
were in them now — the breakings forth of the light 
that lighteneth every man — might grow into the per- 
fect human day ; loving them even the more that they 
were so helpless, so oppressed, so far from that 
ideal which was their life, and which all their dim 
desires were reaching after. 

CCXL. 

Lord, how happy is the time 
When in Thy love I rest ! 

When from my weariness I climb 

Even to Thy tender breast ! 
The night of sorrow endeth there : 

Thou art brighter than the sun; 
And in Thy pardon and Thy care 

The heaven of heaven is won. 

Let the world call herself my foe, 
Or let the world allure, 

1 care not for the world : I go 
To this dear Friend and sure. 



218 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

And when life's fiercest storms are sent 

Upon life's wildest sea, 
My little bark is confident 

Because it holds by Thee. 

When the law threatens endless death 

Upon the awful hill, 
Straightway from her consuming breath, 

My soul goes higher still — 
Goeth to Jesus, wounded, slain, 

And maketh Him her home, 
Whence she will not go out again, 

And where death cannot come. 

I do not fear the wilderness 

Where Thou bast been before; 
Nay, rather will I daily press 

After Thee, near Thee, more. 
Thou art my food ; on Thee I lean ; 

Thou makest my heart sing; 
And to Thy heavenly pastures green 

All Thy dear flock dost bring. 

And if the gate that opens there 

Be dark to other men, 
It is not dark to those who share 

The heart of Jesus then. 
That is not losing much of life 

Which is not losing Thee 
Who art as present in the strife 

As in the victory. 

Therefore how happy is the time 
When in Thy love I restl 



HOPEFULNESS. 219 

When from my weariness I climb 

Even to Thy tender breast ! 
The night of sorrow endeth there : 

Thou art brighter than the sun ; 
And in Thy pardon and Thy care 

The heaven of heaven is won. 

CCXLI. 

Hope never hurt any one — never yet interfered with 
duty ; nay, it always strengthens to the performance 
of duty, gives courage and clears the judgment. St. 
Paul says we are saved by hope. Hope is the most 
rational thing in the universe. Even the ancient poets, 
who believed it was delusive, yet regarded it as an 
antidote given by the mercy of the gods against some 
at least of the ills of life. 

CCXLII. 

I have never known a satisfied Christian. Indeed, 
I should take satisfaction as a poor voucher of Chris- 
tianity. But I have known several contented Chris- 
tians. I might in respect of one or two of them, use 
a stronger word — certainly, not satisfied. I believe 
there is a grand essential — unsatisfaction — I do not 
mean dissatisfaction — which adds the delight of ex- 
pectation to the peace of attainment ; and that, I pre- 
sume, is the very consciousness of heaven. But where 



220 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

faith may not have produced even contentment, it will 
yet sustain hope. We must believe in a living ideal, 
before we can have a tireless heart ; an ideal which 
draws our poor vague ideal to itself, to fill it full and 
make it alive. 

CCXLIII. 

All about us in earth and air, wherever eye or ear 
can reach there is a power ever breathing itself forth in 
signs, now in a daisy, now in awindwaft, a cloud, a sunset ; 
a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with 
the dark and silent world within us ; that the same of 
God who is in us, and upon those tree we are the buds, 
if not yet the flowers, also is all about us — inside, the 
Spirit ; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying 
to meet in us ; and when they meet, then the sign with- 
out, and the longing within, become one in light, and 
the man no more walketh in darkness, but knoweth 
whither he goeth. 

CCXLIV. 

And do not fear to hope. Can poet's brain 
More than the Father's heart rich good invent? 
Each time we smell the autumn's dying scent, 
We know the primrose time will come again ; 
Not more we hope, nor less would soothe our pain. 
Be bounteous in thy faith, for not misspent. 



HOPEFULNESS. 221 

Is confidence unto the Father- lent: 

Thy need is sown and rooted for His rain. 

His thoughts are as thine own ; nor are His ways 

Other than thine, but by their loftier sense 

Of beauty infinite and love intense. 

Work on. One day, beyond all thought of praise, 

A sunny joy will crown thee with its rays ; 

Nor other than thy need, thy recompense. 

CCXLV. 

What we call evil is the only and best shape, which, 
for the person and his condition at the time, could 
be assumed by the best good. 

CCXLVI. 

Suppose God were building a palace for you, and 
had set up a scaffold upon which He wanted you to 
help Him ; would it be reasonable in you to com- 
plain that you didn't find the scaffold at all a com- 
fortable place to live in ? — that it was draughty and 
cold ? This world is that scaffold ; and if you were 
busy carrying stones and mortar for the palace, you 
would be glad of all the cold to cool the glow of 
your labor. 

CCXLVII. 
"I don't know quite," said the curate "what to 



222 CHEERFUL WORDS, 

think about that story of the woman they brought to 
Jesus in the temple -■- 1 mean how it got into that nook 
of the Gospel of St. John, where it has no right place. 
They didn't bring her for healing or for the rebuke 
of the demon, but for condemnation, only they came 
to the wrong man for that. They dared not carry out 
the law of stoning, as they would have liked, I suppose, 
even if Jesus had condemned her, but perhaps they 
hoped rather to entrap Him who was the friend of 
the sinners into saying something against the law.. 
But what I want is, to know how it got there — just 
there, I mean betwixt the seventh and eighth chapters 
of St. John's Gospel. There is no doubt of its being 
an interpolation — that the twelfth verse, I think it is, 
ought to join on to the fifty-second. The Alexandrian 
manuscript is the only one of the three oldest that has 
it, and it is the latest of the three. I did think once 
but hastily, that it was our Lord's text for saying 
/ am the light of the world, but it follows quite as 
well on His offer of living water. One can easily see 
how the place would appear a very suitable one to any 
presumptuous scribe who wished to settle the question 
of where it should stand. I wonder if St. John told 
the lovely tale as something he had forgotten after he 
had finished dictating all the rest. Or was it well 
known to all the evangelists, only no one of them was 
yet partaker enough of the spirit of Him who was the 
friend of sinners, to dare put it on written record, 



FORGIVENESS. 223 

•thinking it hardly a safe story to expose to the quarry- 
ing of men's conclusions. But it doesn't matter much ; 
the tale must be a true one. Only — to think of just 
this one story, of the tenderest righteousness, floating 
about like a holy waif through the world of letters ! 
— a sweet gray dove of promise that can find no rest 
for the sole of its foot ! Just this one story of all 
stories, a kind of outcast ! and yet as a wanderer, oh 
how welcome ! Some manuscripts, I understand, have 
granted it a sort of outhouse-shelter at the end of the 
Gospel of St. Luke. But it all matters nothing, so 
long as we can believe it ; and true it must be, it is so 
like Him all through. And if it does go wandering 
as a stray through the Gospel without place of its own, 
what matters it so long as it can find hearts enough 
to nestle in, and bring forth its young of comfort ! 
Perhaps the woman herself told it, and, as with the 
woman of Samaria, some would and some would not 
believe her. Oh ! the eyes that met upon her ! The 
fiery hail of scorn from those of the Pharisees — the 
light of eternal sunshine from those of Jesus ! I was 
reading the other day, in one of the old Miracle Plays, 
how each that looked on while Jesus wrote with His 
finger on the ground, imagined He was writing down 
his individual sins, and was in terror lest his neighbor 
should come to know them. And wasn't He gentle 
even with those to whom He was sharper than a two- 
edged sword ! and oh how gentle to her He would 



224 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

cover from their rudeness and wrong! Let the sinless 
throw! And the sinners went out, and she followed 
— to sin no more." 

CCXLVIIL 

If thy trouble be a trouble thy God cannot set right, 
then either thy God is not the true God or there is no 
true God, and the man who professed to reveal Him 
led the one perfect life in virtue of His faith in a false- 
hood. Alas ! for poor men and women and their 
aching hearts ! If it offend any of you that I speak 
of Jesus as the man who professed to reveal God, I 
answer that the man I see, and He draws me as with 
the strength of the adorable Truth. 

Come, then, sore heart, and see whether His heart 
cannot heal thine. He knows what sighs and tears 
are, and if He knew no sin in Himself, the more pitiful 
must it have been to Him to behold the sighs and 
tears that guilt wrung from the tortured heart of His 
brethren and sisters. Brothers, sisters, we must get 
rid of this misery of ours. It is slaying us. It is 
turning the fair earth into a hell, and our hearts into 
its fuel. There stands the man who says He knows : 
take Him at His word. Go to Him who says in the 
might of His eternal tenderness and His human pity, 
Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, 
and L will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and 



FORGIVENESS. 225 

learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart: and 
ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, 
and my burden is light. 

CCXLIX. 

O bountiful God who wilt give us back even our 
innocence tenfold! He can give an awaking that 
leaves the past of the soul ten times farther behind 
than ever waking from sleep left the dreams of the 
night. 

If the potency of that awaking lay in the inrush of 
a new billow of life fresh from its original source, 
carrying with it an enlargement of the whole nature 
in every part, a glorification of every faculty, every 
sense even, so that the man, forgetting nothing of his 
past or its shame, should yet cry out in the joy of 
his second birth, " Lo ! I am a new man ; I am no 
more he who did that awful and evil thing, for I am 
no more capable of doing it ! God be praised, for all 
is well ! " would not such an awaking send the past afar 
into the dim distance of the first creation, and wrap 
the ill deed in the clean linen cloth of forgiveness, 
even as the dull creature of the sea rolls up the grain 
of intruding sand in the lovely garment of a pearl ? 
Such an awaking means God Himself in the soul, not 
disdaining closest vital company with the creature He 
foresaw and created. And the man knows in full con- 



226 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

tent that he is healed of his plague. Nor would he 
willingly lose the scars which record its outbreak, for 
they tell him what he is without God, and set him ever 
looking to see that the door into the heavenly garden 
stands wide for God to enter the house when He pleases. 
And who can tell whether in the train of such an awak- 
ing may not follow a thousand opportunities and means 
of making amends to those whom he may have injured. 

CCL. 

Oh ! to be clean as a mountain river ! clean as the 
air above the clouds or on the middle seas ! as the 
throbbing aether that fills the gulf betwixt star and starl 
— nay, as the thought of the Son of Man Himself, 
who, to make all things new and clean, stood up against 
the whole battery of sin-sprung suffering, withstanding 
and enduring and stilling the recoil of the awful force 
wherewith His Father had launched the worlds, and 
given birth to human souls with wills that might become 
free as His own. 

CCLI. 

Methought I floated sightless, nor did know 

That I had ears until I heard the cry 

As of a mighty man in agony: 

" How long Lord shall I lie thus foul and slow ? 

The arrows of Thy lightning through me go 



SACRIFICE. 227 

And sting and torture me — yet here I lie 
A shapeless mass that scarce can mould a sigh." 
The darkness thinned ; I saw a thing below, 
Like sheeted corpse, a knot at head and feet. 
Slow clomb the sun the mountains of the dead, 
And looked upon the world : the silence broke I 
A blinding struggle ! then the thunderous beat 
Of great exulting pinions stroke on stroke 1 
And from that word a mighty angel fled. 

CCLII. 

In the time of the old sacrifices, when God so 
kindly told His ignorant children to do something for 
Him in that way, poor people were told to bring, not 
a bullock or a sheep, for that was more than they 
could get, but a pair of turtle doves or two young 
pigeons. But now, as Crashaw, the poet, says, " Our- 
selves become our own best sacrifice." Depend upon 
it in the midst of all the science about the world and 
its ways, and all the ignorance of God and His great- 
ness, the man or woman who can say, Thy will be done, 
with the true heart of giving up, is nearer the secret 
of things than the geologist and theologian, 

CCLIII. 

The common use of the word martyr is a curious 
instance of how words get degraded. The sufferings 



228 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

involved in martyrdom, and not the pure will giving 
occasion to that suffering, is fixed upon by the com- 
mon mind as the martyrdom. But while martyrdom 
really means a bearing for the sake of the truth, yet 
there is a way in which any suffering, even that we 
have brought upon ourselves, may become martyrdom. 
When it is so borne that the sufferer therein bears 
witness to the presence and Fatherhood of God, in 
quiet, hopeful submission to His will, in gentle endu- 
rance and that effort after cheerfulness which is not 
seldom to be seen where the effort is hardest to make ; 
more than aH perhaps, and rarest of all, when it is 
accepted as the just and merciful consequence ot 
wrong-doing, and is endured humbly, and with right- 
eous shame, as the cleansing of the Father's hand, 
indicating that repentance unto life which lifts the 
sinner out of his sins, and makes him such that the 
holiest men of old would talk to him with gladness 
and respect, then indeed it may be called a martyrdom. 

CCLIV. 

Do you know, I believe that God wanted a grand 
poem from Milton, and therefore blinded him that 
he might be able to write it. But he had first trained 
him up to the point — given him thirty years in which 
he had not to provide the bread of a single day, only 
to learn and think; then set him to teach boys; then 



SACRIFICE. 229 

placed him at Cromwell's side, in the midst of the 
tumultuous movement of public affairs, into which the 
late student entered with all his heart and soul, and 
then last of all He cast the veil of a divine darkness 
over him, sent him into a chamber far more retired 
than that in which he labored at Cambridge, and 
set him like the nightingale to sing darkling. The 
blackness about him was just the great canvass which 
God gave him to cover with forms of light 'and music. 
Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below ; 
the windows of heaven were opened from above ; from 
both rushed the deluge of song which flooded his soul, 
and which he has poured out in a great river to us. 
Who would not be glad to be struck with such blind- 
ness as Milton's ? 

CCLV. 

It is not enough to satisfy God's goodness that He 
should give us all things richly to enjoy, but He must 
make us able to enjoy them as richly as He gives 
them. He has to consider not only the gift, but the 
receiver of the gift. He has to make us able to take 
the gift and make it our own, as well as to give us the 
gift. In fact it is not real giving, with the full, that is, 
the divine meaning of giving, without it. He has to 
give us ro the gift as well as give the gift to us. Now 
for this, a break, an interruption is good, is invaluable, 



230 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

for then we begin to think about the thing, and do 
something in the matter ourselves. The wonder of 
God's teaching is that, in great part, He makes us not 
merely learn, but teach ourselves, and that is far 
grander than it He only made our minds as He makes 
our bodies. 

CCLVI. 

Out of offence to the individual, God brings good 
to the whole ; for he pets no nation but trains it for 
the perfect globular life of all nations — of His world, 
of His universe. As He makes families mingle, to 
redeem each from its family selfishness, so will He 
make nations mingle, and love and correct and reform 
and develop each other, till the planet world shall 
go singing through space, one harmony to the God 
of the whole earth. The excellence must vanish from 
one portion, that it may be diffused through the whole. 

CCLVII. 

Of all teachings, that which presents a far distant 
God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, 
or He is nearer to every one of us than our nearest 
consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is 
the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human 
imaginations. 



THE TRUE CHRISTIAN. 231 

CCLVIII. 

He was gradually learning that his faith must be an 
absolute *>ne, claiming from God everything the love 
of a perfect Father could give, or the needs He had 
created in His child could desire ; that he must not 
look to himself first for help, or imagine that the divine 
was only the supplement to the weakness and failure 
of the human ; that the highest effort of the human 
was to lay hold of the divine. He learned that he 
could keep no simplest law in its loveliness until he 
was possessed of the same spirit whence that law 
sprung ; that the one thing wherein he might imitate 
the free creative will of God was, to will the presence 
and power of that will which gave birth to his. It was 
the vital growth of his faith even when he was too much 
troubled to recognize the fact, that made him strong 
in the midst of weakness ; when the Son of Man cried 
out, Let this cup pass, the Son of God in him could yet 
cry, Let thy will be done. He could " inhabit trembling" 
and yet be brave. 

CCLIX. 

There are those who, in their very first seeking of 
it, are* nearer to the kingdom of heaven than many 
who have for years believed themselves of it. In the 
former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when 



232 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

He calls them they recognize Him at once and go 
after Him while the others examine Him from head to 
foot, and finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus 
of their conception, turn their backs and go to church, 
or chapel, or chamber, to kneel before a vague form 
mingled of tradition and fancy. But the first shall be 
last and the last first, and there are from whom, be it 
penny or be it pound, what they have must be taken 
away because with them it lies useless. 

CCLX. 

What is Christianity? I know but one definition, 
the analysis of which, if the thing in question be a 
truth, must be the joyous labor of every devout heart 
to all eternity. For Christianity does not mean what 
you think, or what I think concerning Christ, but is 
of Christ. My Christianity, if ever I come to have 
any, will be what of Christ is in me ; your Christianity 
now is what of Christ is in you. 

CCLXI. 

"The waves of infidelity," said the curate, " are 
coming in with a strong wind and flowing tide. Who 
is to blame ? God it cannot be, and for unbelievers, 
they are as they were. It is the Christians who are to 
blame. I do not mean those who are called Christians, 



THE TRUE CHRISTIAN. 233 

but those who call and count themselves Christians. 
I tell you, and I speak to each one of whom it is 
true, that you hold and present such a withered, starved, 
miserable, death's-head idea of Christianity ; that you 
are yourself such poverty-stricken believers, if believers 
you are at all ; that the notion you present to the world 
as your ideal, is so commonplace, so false to the grand, 
gracious, mighty hearted Jesus — that you are the 
cause why the truth hangs its head in patience, and 
rides not forth on the white horse, conquering and to 
conquer. You dull its luster in the eyes of men ; you 
deform its fair proportions ; you represent not that 
which it is, but that which it is not, yet call yourselves 
by its name ; you are not the salt of the earth, but a 
salt that has lost its savor, for ye seek all things else 
first, and to that seeking the kingdom of God and His 
righteousness shall never be added. Until you repent 
and believe afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely, 
the Christ revealed by Himself, and not the muffled 
form of something vaguely human and certainly not 
all divine, which the false interpretations of men have 
substituted for Him, you will be as, T repeat, you are, 
the main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, 
and the enemy comes in like a flood. For the sake 
of the progress of the truth, and that into nobler minds 
than yours, it were better you joined the ranks of the 
enemy, and declared what I fear with many of you 
is the fact, that you believe not at all. But whether 



234 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

in some sense you believe or not, the fact remains, 
that, while you are not of those Christians who obey 
the word of the master, doing the things he says to 
them, you are of those Christians, if you will be called 
by the name, to whom he will say, I never knew you ; 
go forth into the outer darkness. 

" But oh what unspeakable bliss of heart and soul 
and mind and sense remains for him, who, like St. 
Paul, is crucified with Christ, who lives no more from 
his own self, but is inspired and informed and pos- 
sessed with the same faith towards the Father in which 
Jesus lived and wrought the will of the Father ! Truly 
the fate of mankind is a glorious one — and that, first 
and last, because men have a God supremely grand, 
all-perfect in Godhead ; for that is, and that alone 
can be, the absolute bliss of the created." 

CCLXII. 

Now that he understood more of the human heart, 
and recognized in this and that human countenance 
the bars of a cage through which peeped an imprisoned 
life, his own heart burned in him with the love of the 
helpless; and if there was mingled therein anything 
of the ambition of benefaction, anything of the love 
of power, anything of self-recommendation, pride of 
influence, or desire to be a center of good, and rule 
in a small kingdom of the aided and aiding, these 



THE TRUE CHRISTIAN. 235 

marshy growths had the fairest chance of dying an 
obscure death; for the one sun potent on the wheat 
for life and on the tares for death is the face of Christ 
Jesus, and in that presence the curate lived more and 
more from day to day. 

CCLXIII. 

A fine muscle is a fine thing, but the finest muscle 
of all, keeping the others going too, is the heart itself. 
That is the true Christian muscle. And the real mus- 
cular Christianity is that which pours in a life-giving 
torrent from the devotion of the heart, receiving only 
that it may give. 

CCLXIV. 

" Jesus buying and selling ! " said the curate, to him- 
self. "And why riot? Did Jesus make chairs and 
tables, or boats perhaps which the people of Nazareth 
wanted, without any mixture of trade in the matter ? 
Was there no transaction ? No passing of money be- 
tween hands ? Did they not pay His Father for them ? 
Was His Father's way of keeping things going in the 
world too vile for the hands of Him whose being was 
delight in the will of the Father ? No ; there must 
be a way of handling money that is noble as the hand- 
ling of the sword in the hands of the patriot. Neither 



236 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

the mean man who loves it, nor the faithless man who 
despises it, knows how to handle it. The former is 
one who allows his dog to become a nuisance, the 
latter one who kicks him from his sight. The noble 
man is he who so truly does the work given him to 
do that the inherent nobility of that work is manifest. 
And the trader who trades nobly, is nobler surely than 
the high born who, if he carried the principles of his 
daily life into trade, would be as pitiful a sneak as any 
one that bows and scrapes falsely behind that altar 
of lies, his counter." 

CCLXV. 

Now that conscience had got up into the guard's 
seat, and will had taken the reins, he found all his 
intellectual faculties in full play, keeping well together, 
heads up and traces tight, while the outrider Imagina- 
tion, with his spotted dog Fancy, was always far ahead, 
but never beyond the sound of the guard's horn ; and 
ever as they went, object after object hitherto beyond 
the radius of his interest rose on the horizon of ques- 
tion, and began to glimmer in the dawn of human 
relation. 

CCLXVI. 

I doubt if wickedness does half as much harm as 
sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the 



THF TRUE CHRISTIAN. 237 

church or of dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is 
condescension, or the sectarianism whose vice is pride. 
Division has done more to hide Christ from the view- 
of men than all the infidelity that has ever been 
spoken. It is the half-Christian clergy of every denom- 
ination that are the main cause of the so-called failure 
of the church of Christ. Thank God it has not failed 
so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the 
satisfaction of any party in it. 

CCLXVII. 

Had I the grace to win the grace 
Of some old man complete in lore, 

My face would worship at his face, 
Like childhood seated on the floor. 

Had I the grace to win the grace 

Of childhood, loving, shy, apart, 
The child should find a nearer place, 

And teach me resting on my heart. 

Had I the grace to win the grace 

Of maiden living all above, 
My soul would trample down the base, 

That she might have a man to love. 

A grace I have no grace to win 
Knocks now at my half-open door : 

Ah Lord of glory, come Thou in, 
The grace divine is all and more. 



238 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCLXVIII. 

True courtesy, that is, courtesy born of a true heart, 
is a most lovely and absolutely indispensable grace 

— one that nobody but a Christian can thoroughly 
develop. God grant us a " coming-on disposition," as 
Shakespeare calls it. Who shall tell whose angel stands 
nearer to the face of the Father ? Should my brother 
stand lower in the social scale than I, shall I not be 
more tender, and respectful, and self-refusing towards 
him, that God has placed him there who may all the 
time be greater than I ? 

CCLXIX. 

What is a truism, as most men count truisms ? 
What is it but a truth that ought to have been buried 
long ago in the lives of men — to send up forever 
the corn of true deeds and the wine of loving kindness 

— but, instead of being buried in friendly soil, is al- 
lowed to lie about, kicked hither and thither in the dry 
and empty garret of their brains, till they are sick of 
the sight and sound of it, and, to be rid of the thought 
of it, declare it to be no living truth but only a lifeless 
truism ! Yet in their brain that truism must rattle 
until they shift it to its rightful quarters in their heart, 
where it will rattle no longer, but take root and be 
a strength and loveliness. Is a truth to cease to be 



THE TRUE CHRISTIAN. 239 

uttered because no better form than that of some 
divine truism — say of St. John Boanerges — can be 
found for it ? To the critic the truism is a sea-worn, 
foot-trodden pebble ; to the obedient scholar, a radiant 
topaz, which as he polishes it with the dust of its use 
may turn into a diamond. 

CCLXX. 

At first, Christianity seemed to men to have only to 
do with their conscience. That was the first relation. 
But even with art it was regarded as having no rela- 
tion except for the presentment of its history. After- 
wards, men forgot the conscience almost, in trying to 
make Christianity comprehensible to the understand- 
ing. Now, I trust, we are beginning to see that Chris- 
tianity is everything or nothing. Either the whole is 
a lovely fable setting forth the loftiest longing of the 
human soul after the vision of the divine, or it is such 
a fact as is the heart not only of theology so-called, 
but of history, politics, science and art : the treasures 
of the Godhead must be hidden in Christ, and there- 
fore by Him only can be revealed. This will interpret 
all things, or it has not yet been. Teachers of men 
have not taught this, because they have not seen it. 
If we do not find Him in nature, we may conclude 
either that we do not understand the expression of 
nature, or have mistaken ideas, or poor feelings about 



240 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Him. It is one great business in our life to find the 
interpretation which will render this harmony visible. 
Till we find it, we have not seen Him to be all in 
all. Recognizing a discord when they touched the 
notes of nature and society, the hermits forsook the 
instrument altogether, and contented themselves with 
a partial symphony, lofty, narrow and weak. Their 
example, more or less, has been followed by almost all 
Christians. Exclusion is so much the easier way of 
getting harmony in the orchestra, than study, insight 
and interpretation, that most have adopted it. It is 
for us, and all who have hope in the infinite God, to 
widen its basis as we may, to search and find the true 
tone and right idea, place and combination of instru- 
ments, until, to our enraptured ear, they all with one 
voice of multiform yet harmonious utterance declare 
the glory of God and of His Christ. 

CCLXXI. 

Let no man who wants to do anything for the soul 
of a man lose a chance of doing something for his 
body. He ought to be willing, and ready, which is 
more than willing, to do that whether or not ; but 
there are those who need this reminder. Of many a 
soul Jesus laid hold by healing the suffering the body 
brought upon it. No one but Himself can tell how 
much the nucleus of the church was composed of and 



THE TRUE CHRISTIAN. 241 

by those who had received health from His hands, 
loving-kindness from the word of His mouth. My own 
opinion is, that herein lay the very germ of the kernel 
of what is now the ancient, was then the infant church ; 
that from them, next to the disciples themselves, went 
forth the chief power of life in love, for they too had 
seen the Lord, and in their own humble way could 
preach and teach concerning Him. What memories 
of Him theirs must have been 1 

CCLXXII. 

To behold the face of Jesus seems to me the one 
thing to be desired. I 'do not know that it is to be 
prayed for; but I think it will be given us as the 
great bounty of God, so soon as ever we are capable 
of it. That sight of the face of Jesus is, I think, what 
is meant by His glorious appearing, but it will come 
as a consequence of His spirit in us not as a cause 
of that spirit in us. The pure in heart shall see God. 
The seeing of Him will be the sign that we are like 
Him, for only by being like Him can we see Him as 
He is. 

CCLXXIII. 

What an awful thing to think that here we are on 
this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the 
feet, and lifting up the head into infinite space — with- 



242 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

out choice or wish of our own — compelled to think 
and to be, whether we will or not ! Just God must 
know it to be very good, or He would not have taken 
it in His hands to make individual lives without a 
possible will of theirs. He must be our Father, or 
we are wretched creatures — the slaves of a fatal 
necessity. Did it ever strike you that each one of us 
stands on the apex of the world ? With a sphere, you 
know, it must be so. And thus is typified, as it seems 
to me, that each one of us must look up for himself 
to find God, and then look abroad to find his fellows. 

CCLXXIV. 

What a wonderful thing waking is ! The time of 
the ghostly moonshine passes by and the great posi- 
tive sunlight comes. A man who dreams, and knows 
that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is ; 
but knows it so little, that he mistakes, one after 
another, many a vague and dim change in his dream, 
for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last, 
he is filled and overflowed with the power of its re- 
ality. So likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies 
waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying 
to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what 
the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up 
before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, 
different from and beyond all his imagining. He feels 



EXISTENCE. 



243 



as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance 
behind him. So shall it be with us when we wake 
from this dream of life into the truer life beyond, and 
find all our present notions of being thrown back as 
into a dim, vapory region of dreamland, where yet we 
thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into 
the present. 

CCLXXV. 

The sun like a golden knot on high, 

Gathers the glories of the sky, 

And binds them into a shining tent, 

Roofing the world with the firmament. 

And through the pavilion the rich winds blow, 

And through the pavilion the waters go. 

And the birds for joy and the trees for prayer, 

Bowing their heads in the sunny air, 

And for thoughts, the gently talking springs, 

That come from the centre with secret things, 

All make a music, gentle and strong, 

Bound by the heart into one sweet song. 

And amidst them all, the mother Earth 

Sits with the children of her birth ; 

She tendeth them all as a mother hen 

Her little ones round her twelve or ten: 

Oft she sitteth, with hands on knee, 

Idle with love for her family. 

Go forth to her from the dark and the dust, 

And weep beside her if weep thou must ; 

If she may not hold thee to her breast 



244 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Like a weary infant that cries for rest ; 

At least she will press thee to her knee, 

And tell a low, sweet tale to thee, 

Till the hue to thy cheek, and the light to thine eye, 

Strength to thy limbs, and courage high 

To thy fainting heart, return amain, 

And away to work thou goest again. 

From the narrow desert, O man of pride, 

Come into the house so high and wide. 

CCLXXVI. 

They who believe in the influence of the stars over 
the fates of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the 
truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as 
related to them merely by a common obedience to 
an external law. All that man sees, has to do with 
man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane 
relationship. The community of the centre of all cre- 
ation suggests an interradiating connection and de- 
pendence of the parts. Else a grander idea is con- 
ceivable than that which is already embodied. The 
blank, which is only a forgotten life lying behind the 
consciousness, and the misty splendor, which is an 
undeveloped life lying before it, may be full of mys- 
terious revelations of other connections with the worlds 
around us, than those of science and poetry. No 
shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green 
glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation 



EXISTENCE. 245 

with the hidden things of a man's soul, and it may 
be, with the secret history of his body as well. They 
are portions of the living house wherein he abides. 

CCXXLVII. 

Without my will I find myself alive, 
And must go forward. Is it God that draws 
Magnetic all the souls unto their home, 
Travelling, they know not how, but unto God? 
It matters little what may come to me 
Of outward circumstance as hunger, thirst 
Social condition, yea, or love or hate ; 
But what shall I be, fifty summers hence ? 
My life, my being, all that meaneth me, 
Goes darkling forward into something — what ? 

,God, Thou knowest. It is not my care. 

If Thou wert less than truth, or less than love, 

It were a fearful thing to be and grow 

We know not what. My God, take care of me 

Pardon and swathe me in an infinite love 

Pervading and inspiring me, Thy child. 

And let Thy own design in me work on, 

Unfolding the ideal man in me ! 

Which being greater far than I have grown, 

1 cannot comprehend. I am Thine, not mine. 
One day completed unto Thine intent 

I shall be able to discourse with Thee ; 

For Thy Idea, gifted with a self, 

Must be of one with the mind where it sprang, 



246 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

And fit to talk with Thee about Thy thoughts. 
Lead me, O Father, holding by Thy hand, 
I ask not whither, for it must be on. 

CCLXXVIII. 

No doubt all the world, in all its moods, is human, 
as those for whose abode and instruction it was made. 
No doubt, it would be void of both beauty and signifi- 
cance to our eyes, were it not that it is one crowd of 
pictures of the human mind, blended in one living 
fluctuating whole. But these meanings are there, in 
solution as it were. The individual is a centre of crys- 
tallization to this solution. Around him meanings 
gather, are separated from other meanings ; and if he 
be an artist,* by which I mean true painter, true poet, 
or true musician, as the case may be, he so isolates 
and re-presents them, that we see them — not what 
nature shows to us, but what nature has shown to 
him, determined by his nature and choice. With it, 
is mingled therefore, so much of his own individuality, 
manifested both in this choice and certain modifica- 
tions determined by his way of working, that you have 
not only a representation of an aspect of nature, as 
far as that may be with limited powers and materials, 
but a revelation of the man's own mind and nature. 
Consequently, there is a human interest in every at- 
tempt to reproduce nature, an interest of individuality 



THE ARTIST. 247 

which does not belong to nature herself, who is for 
all and every man. 

Every man is a convex mirror ; and his drawing, if 
he can make one, is an attempt to show what is in 
this little mirror of his, kindled there by the grand 
world outside. And the human mirrors being all 
differently formed, vary infinitely in what they should 
thus represent of the same scene. I have been greatly 
interested in looking alternately over the shoulders 
of two artists, both sketching in color the same, abso- 
lutely the same scene, both trying to represent it with 
all the truth in their power. How different, notwith- 
standing, the two representations came out ! 

CCLXXIX. 

Every one likes to see his own thoughts set outside 
of him, that he may contemplate them objectively, as 
the philosophers call it. He likes to see the other 
side of them, as it were. Now those who can so set 
them forth are artists ; and however they may fail of 
effecting such a representation of their ideas as will 
satisfy themselves, they yet experience satisfaction in 
the measure in which they have succeeded. But there 
are many more men who cannot yet utter their ideas 
in any form. Mind, I do expect that, if they will only 
be good, they shall have this power some day ; for 



248 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

I do think that many things we call differences in 
kind, may in God's grand scale prove to be only 
differences in degree. And indeed the artist — by 
artist, I mean of course, architect, musician, painter, 
poet, sculptor — in many things requires it just as 
much as the most helpless and dumb of his brethren, 
seeing inproportion to the things that he can do, he 
is aware of the things he cannot do, the thoughts he 
cannot express. 

CCLXXX. 

The more we see into nature, and try to represent 
it, the more ignorant and helpless we find ourselves, 
until sometimes I begin to wonder whether God might 
not have made the world so rich and full just to teach 
His children humiKty. 

CCLXXXI. 

It is impossible for an artist to make a mere trans- 
cript of nature. No man can help seeing nature as 
he is himself. For she has all in her. But if he sees 
no meaning in especial that he wants to give, his por- 
trait of her will represent only her dead face, not her 
living, impassioned countenance. Artists ought to 
interpret nature, but that will only be to interpret 



THE ARTIST. 249 

themselves — something of humanity that is theirs, 
whether they have discovered it or not. If to this 
they can add some teaching for humanity, then indeed 
they may claim to belong to the higher order of art, 
however imperfect they may be in their power of rep- 
resenting — however lowly, therefore, their position 
may be in that order. 

CCLXXXII. 

It is in the winter of the year that art must give us 
its summer. I suspect that most of the poetry about 
spring and summer is written in the winter. It is gen- 
erally when we do not possess, that we lay full value 
upon what we lack. 

CCLXXXIII. 

Better to have the poet's heart than brain, 
Feeling than song ; but better far than both, 
To be a song, a music of God's making; 
Or but a table on which God's finger of flame, 
In words harmonious, of triumphant verse, 
That mingles joy and sorrow, sets down clear/ 
That out of darkness He hath called the light. 
It may be voice to such is after given, 
To tell the mighty tale to other worlds. 



250 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCLXXXIV. 

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call 
the reality ? — not so grand or so strong, it may be, 
but always lovelier ? Fair as is the gliding sloop on 
the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail 
below, is fairer still. Yea, the reflecting ocean itself, 
reflected in the mirror, has a wondrousness about its 
waters that somewhat vanishes when I turn toward 
itself. All mirrors are magic mirrors. The common- 
est room is a room in a poem when I turn to the 
glass. In whatever way it may be accounted for, of 
one thing we may be sure, that this feeling is no 
cheat ; for there is no cheating in nature, and the 
simple, unsought feelings of the soul. There must be 
a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay 
hold of the meaning. Even the memories of past 
pain are beautiful ; and past delights, though beheld 
only through clefts in the gray clouds of sorrow, are 
lovely as Fairy-land. 

CCLXXXV. 

To the God of the human heart nothing that has 
ever been a joy, a grief, a passing interest, can ever 
cease to be what it has been; there is no fading at 
the breath of time, no passing away of fashion, no 



MEMORY. 251 

dimming of old memories in the breast of Him whose 
being creates time. 

CCLXXXVI. 

Surely, the results of the past are the man's own. 
Any action of one man's upon which the life in him 
reposes, remains his. But suppose a man had done 
a good deed once, and instead of making that a foun- 
dation upon which to build more good, grew so vain 
of it that he became incapable of doing anything more 
of the same sort, you could not say that the action 
belonged to him still. Therein he has severed his 
connection with the past. Again, what has never in 
any deep sense been a man's own, cannot surely con- 
tinue to be his afterwards. Thus the things that a 
man has merely possessed once, the very people who 
most admired him for their sakes when he had them, 
give him no credit for after he has lost them. Riches 
that have taken to themselves wings, leave with the 
poor man only a surpassing poverty. Strength, like- 
wise, which can so little depend on any exercise of 
the will in man, passes from him with the years. It 
was not his all the time. It was but lent him, and 
had nothing to do with his inward force. A bodily 
feeble man may put forth a mighty life-strength in 
effort, and show nothing to the eyes of his neighbor, 
while the strong man gains endless admiration for 



252 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

what he could hardly help. But the effort of the one 
remains, for it was his own ; the strength of the other 
passes from him, for it was never his own. 

CCLXXXVII. 

I think I remember all outside events, chiefly by 
virtue of the inward conditions with which they were 
associated. Mere outside things I am very ready to 
forget : moods of my own mind do not so readily pass 
away, and with the memory of some of them every 
outward circumstance returns. For a man's life is 
where the kingdom of heaven is — within him. There 
are people who, if you ask the story of their lives, 
have nothing to tell you but the course of the outward 
events that have constituted, as it were, the clothes, of 
their history. But I know, at the same time, that some 
of the most important crisis in my own history, by 
which word, history, I mean my growth towards the 
right conditions of existence, have been beyond the 
grasp and interpretation of my intellect; they have 
passed as it were, without my consciousness being 
awake enough to lay hold of their phenomena ; the 
wind had been blowing : I had heard the sound of it 
but knew not whence it came nor whither it went ; 
only when it was gone, I found myself more responsi- 
ble, more eager than before. 



MEMORY. 253 

CCXXXVIII. 

As long as our Lord was with His disciples, they 
could not see Him right : He was too near them. Too 
much light, too many words, too much revelation, 
blinds or stiipifies. The Lord had been with them 
long enough. They loved Him dearly, and yet often 
forgot His words almost as soon as He said them. 
He could not get it into them, for instance, that He 
had not come to be a king. Whatever He said, they 
shaped it over again after their own fancy : and their 
minds were so full of their own worldly notions of 
grandeur and command, that they could not receive 
into their souls the gift of God present before their 
eyes. Therefore He was taken away, that His spirit, 
which was more Himself than His bodily presence, 
might come into them — that they might receive the 
gift of God into their innermost being. After He had 
gone out of their sight, and they might look all around 
and down in the grave and up in the air and not 
see Him anywhere — when they thought they had lost 
Him, He began to come to them from the other side 
— from the inside. They found that the image of 
Him which His presence with them had printed in 
light upon their souls, began to revive in the dark of 
His absence ; and not that only, but that in looking 
at it without the overwhelming of His bodily presence, 
lines and forms and meanings began to dawn out of 



254 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

it, which they had never seen before. And His words 
came back to them, no longer as they had received 
them, but as He meant them. The spirit of Christ 
filling their hearts, and giving them new power, made 
them remember, by making them able to understand, 
all that He had said to them. They were then always 
saying to each other, " You remember how ? " whereas 
before, they had been always staring at each other 
with astonishment, and something very near incredu- 
lity, while He spoke to them. So that after He had 
gone away, He was really nearer to them than He had 
ever been before. The meaning of anything is more 
than its visible presence. There is a soul in every- 
thing and that soul is the meaning of it. 

CCLXXXIX. 

Yea, some will mourn and sing about their loss, 
And for the sake of sweet sounds cherish it, 
Nor yet believe that it was more than seeming. 
But he in whom the child's heart hath not died, 
Hath grown a man's heart, loveth yet the Past j 
Believes in all its beauty ; knows the hours 
Will melt the mists ; and though this very day 
Casts but a dull stone on Time's heaped-up cairn, 
A morning light will break one morn and draw 
The hidden glories of a thousand hues 
Out from its crystal-depths and ruby-spots 
And sapphire veins, unseen, unknown, before. 



BY THE SEA. 255 

Far in the future lies his refuge. Time 

Is God's, and all its miracles are His ; 

And in the Future he o'ertakes the Past, 

Which was a prophecy of times to come : 

There lie great flashing stars, the same that shone 

In childhood's laughing heaven; there lies the wonder 

In which the sun went down and moon arose ; 

The joy with which the meadows opened out 

Their daisies to the warming sun of spring ; 

Yea, all the inward glory, ere cold fear 

Froze, or doubt shook the mirror of his soul 

To reach it, he must climb the present slope 

Of this day's duty — here he would not rest. 

But all the time the glory is at hand 

Urging and guiding. 

ccxc. 

The sea was so calm, and the shore so gently slop- 
ing, that you could hardly tell where the sand ceased 
and the sea began — the water sloped to such a thin 
pellicle, thinner than any knife's edge, upon the shin- 
ing brown sand, and you saw the sand underneath the 
water to such a distance out. Yet this depth, which 
would not drown a red spider, was the ocean. In my 
mind I followed that bed of shining sand, bared of 
its hiding waters, out and out, till I was lost in an 
awful wilderness of chasms, precipices and mountain- 
peaks, in whose caverns the sea-serpent may dwell, 



256 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

with his breath of pestilence ; the kraken, with his 
skaly rind, " may there be sleeping 

" His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep," 
while 

"faintest sunlights flee 
About his shadowy sides," 
as he lies 

" Battering on huge seaworms in his sleep." 

There may be all the horrors that Schiller's diver 
encountered — the frightful molch, and that worst of 
all to which he gives no name, which came creeping 
with a hundred knots at once ; but here, are only the 
gracious rainbow woven shells, an evanescent jelly or 
two, and the queer baby-crabs that crawl out from 
the holes of the bordering rocks. What awful grada- 
tions of gentleness lead from such as these down to 
those caverns where wallow the inventions of nature's 
infancy, when like a child of untutored imagination, 
she drew on the slate of her fancy creations in which 
flitting shadows of beauty serve only to heighten the 
shuddering grewsome horror ! The sweet sun and air, 
the hand of man, and the growth of the ages, have 
all but swept such from the upper plains of the earth ; 
what hunter's bow has twanged, what adventurer's 
rifle has cracked in those leagues of mountain waste, 
vaster than all the upper world can show, where " the 
beasts of the ocean graze the sea-weed their pasture ! " 
Diana of the silver bow herself, when she descends 



BY THE SEA. 257 

into the interlunar caves of hades, sends no such 
monsters fleeing from her spells. Yet if such there 
be, such horrors, too, must lie in the undiscovered 
caves of man's nature, of which all this outer world 
is but a typical analysis. By equally slow gradations 
may the inner eye descend from the truth of a Cor- 
delia to the falsehood of an lago. As these golden 
sands slope from the sunlight into the wallowing 
abyss of darkness, even so from the love of the child 
to his holy mother, slopes the inclined plane of hu- 
manity to the hell of the sensualist. 

"But with this one difference in the moral world," 
I said aloud, as I paced up and down on the shim- 
mering margin — " that everywhere in the scale the 
eye of the All-seeing Father can detect the first quiver 
of the eyelid that would raise itself heavenward, re- 
sponsive to his waking spirit." I lifted my eyes in 
the relief of the thought, and saw how the sun of the 
autumn hung above the waters, oppressed with a mist 
of his own glory ; far away to the left a man who 
had been clambering on a low rock, inaccessible save 
in such a tide, gathering mussels, threw himself into 
the sea and swam ashore ; above his head the storm- 
tower stood in the stormless air ; the sea glittered and 
shone, and the long-winged birds knew not which to 
choose, the balmy air, or the cool deep, now flitting 
like arrow-heads through the one, now alighting eag- 



258 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

erly upon the other, to forsake it anew, for the thinner 
element. I thanked God for His glory. 

CCXCI. 

In regard to one of the vexed questions of the 
day, the rights of women — it seems to me that what 
women demand, it is not for men to withhold. It is 
not their business to lay down the law for women. 
That, women must lay down for themselves. I con- 
fess that, although I must herein seem to many of my 
readers old-fashioned and conservative, I should not 
like to see any woman I cared much for, either in 
parliament or in an anatomical class-room ; but on 
the other hand I feel that women must be left free 
to settle that matter. If it is not good, good women 
will find it out, and recoil from it. If it is good, then 
God give them good speed. One thing they have a 
right to — a far wider and more valuable education 
than they have been in the habit of receiving. When 
the mothers are well taught, the generations will grow 
in knowledge at a four-fold rate. But still the teach- 
ing of life is better than all the schools, and common- 
sense than all learning. This common-sense is a rare 
gift, scantier in none than in those who lay claim 
to it on the ground of following commonplace, worldly 
and prudential maxims. 



WOMAN. 259 

CCXCII. 

One of the most important qualifications of a sick 
nurse is a ready smile. A long-faced nurse in a sick 
room, is a visible embodiment and presence of the 
disease, against which the eager life of the patient is 
fighting in agony. Such ought to be banished with 
their black dresses and their mourning-shop looks, 
from every sick chamber, and permitted to minister 
only to the dead, who do not mind looks. With what 
a power of life and hope does a woman — young or 
old, I do not care — with a face of the morning, a 
dress like the spring, a bunch of wild flowers in her 
hand, with the dew upon them, and perhaps in her 
eyes, too — I don't object to that — that is sympathy, 
not the worship of darkness — with what a message 
from nature and life does she, looking death in the 
face with a smile, dawn upon the vision of the invalid ? 
She brings a little health, a little strength to fight, a 
little hope to endure, actually lapt in the folds of her 
gracious garments. For the soul itself can do more 
than any medicine, if it be fed with the truth of life. 

CCXCIII. 

It is not through the judgment that a troubled heart 
can be set at rest. It needs a revelation, a vision ; 
a something for the higher nature that breeds and 



26o CHEERFUL WORDS. 

unfolds the intellect, to recognize as its own, and lay 
hold of by faithful hope. And what fitter messenger 
of such hope than the harmonious presence of a 
woman, whose form, itself, tells of highest law, and 
concord, and uplifting obedience ; such a one whose 
beauty walks the upper air of noble loveliness ; whose 
voice, even in speech, is one of the " sphere-born har- 
monious sisters ? " The very presence of such a being 
gives unbelief the lie, deep as the throat of her lying. 
Harmony, which is beauty and law, works necessary 
faith in the region capable of truth ; it needs the 
intervention of no reasoning. 

CCXCIV. 

I believe that many women go into consumption 
just from discontent — the righteous discontent of a 
soul which is meant to sit at the Father's table, and 
so cannot content itself with the husks which the 
swine eat. The theological nourishment which is 
offered them, is generally no better than husks. They 
cannot live upon it, and so die and go home to their 
Father. And without good spiritual food to keep the 
spiritual senses healthy and true, they cannot see the 
things about them as they really are. They cannot 
find interest in them, because they cannot find their 
own place amongst them. 



WOMAN. 261 

ccxcv. 

In our poor weakness and narrowness and self-love, 
even of Jesus, the bodily may block out the spiritual 
nearness, which, however, in most moods we may be 
unable to realize the fact, is and remains a thing un- 
utterably lovejier and better and dearer — enhancing 
tenfold what vision of a bodily presence may at some 
time be granted us. But how any woman can help 
casting herself heart and soul at the feet -of such 
lowly grandeur, such a tender majesty, such a self- 
dissolving perfection — I cannot imagine. The truth 
must be that those who kneel not have not seen. You 
do not once read of a woman being against Him 
— except indeed it was His own mother, when she 
thought He was going all astray and forgetting His 
high mission. The divine love in Him towards His 
Father in heaven and His brethren of men, was ever 
melting down His conscious individuality in sweetest 
showers upon individual hearts ; He came down like 
rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the 
earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw Him as 
He was and did not worship ! " 

CCXCVI. 

Among women, was it not always to peasant women 
that heavenly messages came ? See revelation culmi- 



262 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

nate in Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of John the 
Baptist and Jesus. Think how much fitter that it 
should be so — that they to whom the word of God 
comes, should be women bred in the dignity of a na- 
tural life, and familiarity with the large ways of the 
earth ; women of simple and few wants, without dis- 
traction and with time for reflection — -.compelled to 
reflection indeed, from the enduring presence of an 
unsullied consciousness : for wherever there is a hum- 
ble, thoughtful nature, into that nature the divine 
consciousness, that is, the spirit of God, passes as 
into its own place. Holy women are to be found 
every where, but the prophetess is not so likely to 
be found in the city as in the hill-country. 

CCXCVII. 

Some people can thrive tolerably without much 
thought: at least they both live comfortably without 
it, and do not seem to be capable of effecting it, if it 
were required of them ; while for others a large amount 
of mental and spiritual operation is necessary for the 
health of both body and mind, a^d when the matter 
or occasion for so much is not afforded them, the con- 
sequence is analagous to what follows when a healthy 
physical system is not supplied with sufficient food : 
the oxygen, the source of life, begins to consume the 



FOOD. 263 

life itself; it tears up the timbers of the house to 
burn against the cold. Or, to use a different simile, 
when the Moses-rod of circumstance does not strike 
the rock and make the waters flow, such a mind — one 
that must think to live — will go digging into itself, 
and is in danger of injuring the very fountain of 
thought, by drawing away its living water into ditches 
and stagnant pools. 

CCXCVIII. 

Humanity may, like other vital forms, diseased 
systems, fix on this or that as the object not merely 
of its desire but of its need : it can never be stilled 
by less than the bread of life — the very presence in 
the innermost nature of the Father and the Son. 

CCXCIX. 

It is wonderful upon how little rare natures, capable 
of making the most of things, will live and thrive. 
There is a great deal more to be got out of things 
than is generally got out of them, whether the thing 
be a chapter of the Bible, or a yellow turnip, and the 
marvel is, that those who use the most material should 
so often be those that show the least result in strength 
or character? 



264 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

ccc. 

Father, I cry to Thee for bread, 

With hungered longing, eager prayer; 

Thou hear'st, and givest me instead 
More hunger and a half despair. 

Lord ! how long ? My days decline 
My youth is lapped in memories old, 

1 need not bread alone, but wine — . 
See, cup and hand to Thee I hold. 

And yet Thou givest : thanks O Lord ! 

That still my heart with hunger faints ! 
The day will come when at Thy board 

I sit forgetting all my plaints. 

If rain must come and winds must blow, 
And I pore long o'er dim seen chart. 

Yet, Lord, let not the hunger go, 
And keep the faintness at my heart. 

CCCI. 

It maybe said of the body in regard of sleep as 
well as in regard of death, " it is sown in weakness, 
it is raised in power." No one can deny the power 
of the wearied body to paralyze the soul : but I have 
a correlate theory which I love, and which I expect 
to find true that, while the body wearies the mind, it 
is the mind that restores vigor to the body, and then, 
like the man who has built him a stately palace, re- 



SLEEP. 265 

joices to dwell in it. I believe that the mind in the 
quiescence of its consciousness in sleep comes into a 
less disturbed contact with its origin, the heart of the 
creation ; whence, gifted with calmness and strength 
for itself, it grows able to impart comfort and restora- 
tion to the weary frame. The cessation of labor affords 
but the necessary occasion ; makes it possible, as it 
were, for the occupant of an outlying station in the 
wilderness to return to his father's house for fresh 
supplies of all that is needful for life and energy. 
The child-soul goes home at night, and returns in 
the morning to the labors of the school. Mere physi- 
cal rest could never of its own negative self, build 
up the frame in such light and vigor as come through 
sleep. 

CCCII. 

When round the earth the Father's hands 

Have gently drawn the dark; 
Sent off the sun to freshen lands, 

And curtained in the lark ; 
'Tis sweet, all tired with glowing day, 

To fade with fading light ; 
To lie once more, the old weary way, 

Upfolded in the night. 

If mothers o'er our slumbers bend, 

And unripe kisses reap, 
In soothing dreams with sleep they blend, 

'Till even in dreams we sleep. 



266 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

And if we wake while night is dumb, 
'Tis sweet to turn and say, 

It is an hour ere dawning come, 
And I will sleep till day, 

There is a dearer, warmer bed 

Where one all day may lie, 
Earth's bosom pillowing the head, 

And let the world go by. 
There come no watching mother's eyes ; 

The stars instead look down: 
Upon it breaks, and silent dies, 

The murmur of the tpwn. 

The great world, shouting, forward fares : 

His chamber, hid from none, 
Hides safe from all, for no one cares 

For him whose work is done, 
Cheer thee, my friend ; bethink thee how 

A certain unknown place, 
Or here, or there, is waiting now, 

To rest thee from thy race. 

Nay, nay, not there the rest from harms, 

The slow composed breath ! 
Not there the folding of the arms I 

Not there the sleep of death ! 
It needs no curtained bed to hide 

The world with all its wars; 
No grassy cover to divide 

From sun and moon and stars. 

There is a rest that deeper grows 
In midst of pain and strife; 



LONGING. 267 

A mighty, conscious, willed repose, 

The death of deepest life. 
To have and hold the precious prize 

No need of jealous bars ; 
But windows open to the skies, 

And skill to read the stars. 

Who dwelleth in that secret place, 

Where tumult enters not, 
Is never cold with terror base, 

Never with anger hot. 
For if an evil host should dare 

His very heart invest, 
God is his deeper heart and there 

He enters into rest. 

When mighty sea-winds madly blow, 

And tear the scattered waves, 
Peaceful as summer woods, below 

Lie darkling ocean caves: 
The wind of words may toss my heart, 

But what is that to me ! 
'Tis but a surface storm — Thou art 

My deep, still, resting sea. 

CCCIII. 

My heart is full of inarticulate pain, 

And beats laborious. Cold ungenial looks 

Invade my sanctuary. Men of gain, 
Wise in success, well-read in feeble books, 

No nigher come, I pray u your air is drear ; 

'Tis winter and low skies when ye appear. 



268 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Beloved, who love beauty and fair truth ! 

Come nearer me ; too near ye cannot come ; 
Make me an atmosphere with your sweet youth ; 

Give me your souls to breathe in a large room 
Speak not a word, for see my spirit lies 
Helpless and dumb ; shine on me with your eyes. 

O all wide places, far from feverous towns I 

Great shining seas ! pine forests ! mountains wild ! 

Rock-bosomed shores ! rough heaths ! and sheep-cropt downs I 
Vast pallid clouds! blue spaces undefined ! 

Room ! give me room ! give loneliness and air 1 
ree things and plenteous in your regions fair. 

White dove of David, flying overhead, 

Golden with sunlight on thy snowy wings, 
Outspeeding thee my longing thoughts are fled 

To find a home afar from men and things ; 
Where in His temple, earth o'erarched with sky, 
God's heart to mine may speak, my heart reply. 

O God of mountains, stars and boundless spaces I 

God of freedom and of joyous hearts 1 
When Thy face looketh forth from all men's faces. 
There will be room enough in crowded marts ; 
Brood thou around me, and the noise is o'er ; 
Thy universe my closet with shut door. 

Heart, heart awake ! The love that loveth all 
Maketh a deeper calm than Horeb's cave, 

God in thee, can His children's folly gall ? 

Love may be hurt, but shall not love be brave? — 

Thy holy silence sinks in dews of balm ; 

Thou art my solitude, my mountain calm. 



IMMOR TALITY. 269 

CCCIV. 

Only in himself can a man find the finite to wor- 
ship ; only in turning back upon himself does he create 
the finite for and by his worship. All the works of 
God are everlasting; the only perishable are some 
of - the works of man. All love is a worship of the 
infinite ; what is called a man's love for himself, is not 
love ; it is but a phantastic resemblance of love ; it is 
a creating of the finite, a creation of death. 

CCCV. 

It is not immortality the human heart cries out after, 
but that immortal eternal thought whose life is its 
life, whose wisdom is its wisdom, whose ways and 
whose thoughts shall — must one day — become its 
ways and its thoughts. Dissociate immortality from 
the living immortality, and it is not a thing to be 
desired — not a thing that can on those terms, or 
even on the fancy of those terms, be desired. 

CCCVI. 

I have roamed the world and reaped many harvests. 
In the deepest agony I have never refused the conso- 
lations of Nature or of Truth. I have never know- 
ingly accepted any founded in falsehood, in forgetful- 



270 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

ness, or in distraction. Let such as have no hope 
in God drink of what Lethe they can find ; to me 
it is a river of hell, and altogether abominable. I 
could not be content even to forget my sins. There 
can be but one deliverance from them, namely, that 
God and they should come together in my soul. In 
His presence I shall serenely face them. Without Him 
I dare not think of them. With God a man can 
confront anything ; without God he is but the with- 
ered straw which the sickle of the reaper has left 
standing on a wintry field. But to forget them would 
be to cease and begin anew, which to one aware of 
his immortality is a horror. 

CCCVII. 

I think that nothing made is lost : 
That not a moon has ever shone, 

That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed 
But to my soul is gone. 

That all the lost years garnered lie 

In this Thy casket, my dim soul ; 
And Thou wilt once, the key apply, 

And show the shining whole. 

CCCVIII. 

What God-like relation can the ever-living, life-giving, 
changeless God, hold to creatures who partake not 



IMMOR TALI TV. 27 1 

of His life ; who have death at the very core of their 
being, are, not worth their Maker's keeping alive ? To< 
let His creatures die would be to change, to abjure 
His Godhood, to cease to be that which He had made 
Himself. If they are not worth keeping alive, then 
His creating is a poor thing, and He is not so great; 
nor so divine, as even the poor thoughts of those His 
dying creatures have been able to imagine Him. But 
our Lord says, " All live unto him." With Him death 
is not. Thy life sees our life, O Lord. All of whom 
all can be said are present to Thee. Thou thinkest 
about us, eternally more than we think about Thee. 
The little life that burns within the body of this 
death, glows unquenchable in Thy true-seeing eyes. 
If Thou didst forget us for a moment, then indeed, 
death would be. But unto Thee we live. The beloved 
pass from our sight, but they pass not from Thine. 
This that we call death, is but a form in the eyes of 
men. It looks something final, an awful cessation, an 
utter change. It seems not probable that there is 
anything beyond. But if God could see us before 
we were, and make us after His ideal, that we shall 
have passed from the eyes of our friends can be no 
argument that He beholds us no longer. All live unto 
Him. Let the change be ever so great, ever so im- 
posing ; let the unseen life be ever so vague to our 
conception, it is not against reason to hope that God 
could see Abraham after his Isaac had ceased to see 



272 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

him ; saw Isaac after Jacob had ceased to see him ; 
saw Jacob after some of the Sadducees had began to 
doubt whether there ever had been a Jacob at all. 
He remembers them ; that is, He carries them in His 
mind ; He of whom God thinks, lives. He takes to 
Himself the name of their God. The Living One 
cannot name Himself, after the dead, when the very 
Godhead lies in the giving of life. Therefore they 
must be alive. If He speaks of them, remembers His 
own loving thoughts of them, would He not have 
kept them alive if He could ; and if He could not, 
how could He create them ? Can it be an easier thing 
to call into life than to keep alive ? 

CCCIX. 

Give God thy dead to bury. Say — If it die 
Yet Thou, the life of life, art still alive, 
And Thou cans't make Thy dead alive again." 

Ah God ! the earth is full of cries and moans : 
And dull despair, that neither moans nor cries; 
Thousands of hearts are waiting helplessly; 
The whole creation groaneth, travaileth 
For what it knows not, but with dull-eyed hope 
Of resurrection, or of dreamless death 1 
Raise Thou the dead of Aprils past and gone 
In hearts of maidens ; restore the autumn fruits 
Of old men feebly mournful oe'r the life 
Which scarce hath memory, but this mournf ulness. 
There is no past with Thee ; bring back once more 



IMMOR TALI TV. 273 

The summer eves of lovers over which 

The wintry wind that raveth through the world 

Heaps wretched leaves, half tombed in ghastly snow; 

Bring back the mother-heaven of orphans lone, 

The brother's and the sister's faithfulness ; 

Bring forth the kingdom of the Son of Man. 

They troop around me, children wildly crying; 
Women with faded eyes, all spent of tears : 
Men who have lived for love yet lived alone, 
And other worse whose grief cannot be said. 
O God, Thou hast a work fit for Thy strength, 
To save these hearts of Thine with full content — 
Except Thou give them Lethe's stream to drink 
And that, my God, were all unworthy Thee. 

Dome up, O heaven ! yet higher o'er my head ; 
Back, back horizon! widen out my world; 
Rush in, O infinite sea of the Unknown 
For, though He slay me, I will trust in God. 

cccx. 

At whatever time death may arrive, or in whatever 
condition the man may be at the time, it comes as the 
best and only good that can at that moment reach 
him. We are, perhaps, too much in the habit of* 
thinking of death as the culmination of disease, which, 
regarded only in itself, is an evil, and a terrible evil. 
But I think rather of death as the first pulse of the 
new strength, shaking itself free from the old mouldy 
remnants of earth-garments, that it may begin in free- 
dom the new life that grows out of the old. The cater- 



274 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

pillar dies into the butterfly. Who knows but disease 
may be the coming, the keener life, breaking into this 
and beginning to destroy like fire the inferior modes 
or garments of the present ? And then disease would 
be but the sign of the salvation of fire ; of the agony 
of the greater life to lift us to itself, out of that 
wherein we are failing and sinning. 

CCCXI. 

Shall God be the God of the families of the earth, 
and shall the love that He has thus created towards 
father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, 
go moaning and longing to all eternity ; or worse, far 
worse, die out of our bosoms ? Shall God be God, 
and shall this be the. end ? 

Ah, my friends ! what will resurrection or life be 
to me, how shall I continue to love God as I have 
learned to love Him through you, if I find He cares 
so little for this human heart of mine, as to take from 
me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms ? 
True, I might have a gaze at Jesus, now and then ; but 
He would not be so good as I had thought Him. 
And how should I see Him if I could not see you ? 
God will not take you, has not taken you from me 
to bury you out of my sight in the abyss of His own 
unfathomable being, where I cannot follow and find 
you, myself lost in the same awful gulf. No, our God 



IMMOR TALI TV. 27 5 

is an unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise you 
from the dead that I may behold you ; that that which 
vanished from the earth may again stand forth, look- 
ing out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, 
holding out the same mighty hand of brotherhood, the 
same delicate and gentle, yet strong hand of sister- 
hood, to me, this me that knew you, and loved you, in 
the days gone by. I shall not care that the matter of 
the forms I loved a thousand years ago, has returned 
to mingle with the sacred goings on of God's science, 
upon that far-off world wheeling its nursery of growing 
loves and wisdoms through space; I shall not care 
that the muscle which now sends the ichor through 
your veins is not formed of the very particles which 
once sent the blood to the pondering brain, the flash- 
ing eye, or the nervous right arm ; I shall not care, I 
say, so long as it is yourselves .that are before me, 
beloved ; so long as through these forms I know that 
I look on my own, on my loving souls of the ancient 
time ; so long as my spirits have got garments of 
revealing, after their own old lovely fashion, garments 
to reveal themselves to me. The new shall then be 
dear as the old, and for the same reason, that it 
reveals the o!4 love. And in the changes, which, 
thank God, must take place when the mortal puts on 
immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our 
friends are, the more they are themselves ; that the 
more the idea of each is carried out in the perfection 



276 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

of beauty, the more like are they to what we thought 
them in our most exalted moods, to that which we saw 
them in the rarest moments of profoundest commu- 
nion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all 
thejr imperfections when we loved them the truest ? 

CCCXII. 

Think, brothers, think, sisters, we walk in the air 
of an eternal Fatherhood. Every uplifting of the 
heart is a looking up to the Father. Graciousness 
and truth are around, above, beneath us, yea, in us. 
When we are least worthy, then, most tempted, hard- 
est, unkindest, let us commend our spirits into His 
hands. Whither else dare we send them ? How the 
earthly father would love a child who would creep into 
his room with angry, troubled face, ana sit down at 
his feet, saying when asked what he wanted, " I feel 
so naughty, papa, and I want to get good ! " Would 
he say to his child, " How dare you ! Go away and 
be good, and then come to me ? " And shall we dare 
to think God would send us away if we came thus, 
and would not be pleased that we. came, even if we 
were angry as Jonah ? Would we not Jet all the ten- 
derness of our nature flow forth upon such a child ? 
And shall we dare to think that if we being evil know 
how to give good gifts to our children ; God will not 
give us His own Spirit when we come to ask Him ? 



GOD THE FA THER. 277 

Will not some heavenly dew descend cool upon the 
hot anger? some genial raindrop on the dry selfish- 
ness ? some glance of sunlight on the cloudy hope- 
lessness ? Bread, at least, will be given, and not a 
stone ; water, at least, will be sure, and not vinegar 
mingled with gall. 

Nor is there anything we can ask for ourselves that 
we may not ask for another. We may commend any 
brother, any sister, to the common fatherhood. And 
there will be moments when, filled with that Spirit 
which is the Lord, nothing will ease our hearts of 
their love but the commending of all men, all our 
brothers, all our sisters, to the one Father. Nor shall 
we ever know that repose in the Father's hands, that 
rest of the Holy Sepulchre which the Lord knew 
when the agony of death was over, when the storm 
of the world died away behind His retiring spirit, and 
He entered the regions where there is only life, and 
all that is not music is silence (for all noise comes of 
the conflict of Life and Death), we shall never be 
able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till 
the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of 
the brothers. For He cannot be our Father save as 
He is their Father ; and if we do not see Him and 
feel Him as their Father, we cannot know Him as 
ours. Never shall we know Him aright until we re- 
joice and exult for our race that He is the Father. 



278 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCCXIII. 

Come to me, come to me, O my God ; 

Come to me everywhere ! 
Let the trees mean Thee, and the grassy sod, 

And the water and the air, 

For Thou art so far that I often doubt, 

As on every side I stare, 
Searching within, and looking without, 

If Thou art anywhere. 

How did men find Thee in days of old ? 

How did they grow so sure ? 
They fought in Thy name, they were glad and bold, 

They suffered and kept themselves pure. 

But now they say — neither above the sphere, 

Nor down in the heart of man, 
But only in fancy, ambition or fear. 

The thought of Thee began. 

If only that perfect tale were true 

Which with touch of sunny gold 
Of the ancient many makes one anew, 

And simplicity manifold. 

But He said that they who did His word, 

The truth of it should know : 
I will try to do it — if He be Lord 

Perhaps the old spring will flow: 



GOD THE FATHER. 279 

Perhaps the old spirit-wind will blow 

That He promised to their prayer; 
And doing Thy will, I yet shall know 

Thee, Father, everywhere ? 

CCCXIV. 

Am I going to sleep — to lose consciousness — to 
be helpless for a time — thoughtless — dead ? Or, 
more awful consideration, in the dreams that may 
come may I not be weak of will and scant of con- 
science. " Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit." I give myself back to Thee. Take me, soothe 
me, refresh me, " Make me over again." Am I going 
out into the business and turmoil of the day, where 
so many temptations may come, to do less honorably, 
less faithfully, less kindly, less diligently, than the 
Ideal Man would have me do ? — Father into thy 
hands. Am I going to do a good deed ? Then, of all 
times: — Father into thy hands ; lest the enemy should 
have me now. Am I going to do a hard duty, from 
which I would gladly be turned aside — to refuse a 
friend's request, to urge a neighbor's conscience ? — 
Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. Am I in 
pain ? Is illness coming upon me to shut out the 
glad visions of a healthy brain, and bring me such as 
are troubled and untrue ? — Take my spirit, Lord, and 
see, as thou art wont, that it has no more to bear than 



280 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

it can bear. Am I going to die ? Thou knowest, if 
only from the. cry of Thy Son, how terrible that is ; 
and if it comes not to me in so terrible a shape 
as that in which it came to Him, think how poor to 
bear I am beside Him. I do not know what the 
struggle means ; for, of the thousand who pass through 
it every day, not one enlightens his neighbor left 
behind ; but shall I not long with agony for one 
breath of Thy air and not receive it ? shall I not be 
torn asunder with dying ? — Father, into thy hands I 
commend my spirit. For it is Thy business, not mine. 
Thou wilt know every shade of my suffering ; Thou 
wilt care for me with Thy perfect fatherhood ; for that 
makes my worship, and in wraps and infolds it. As a 
child I could bear great pain when my father was 
leaning over me, or had his arm about me : how much 
nearer my soul cannot Thy hands come ! yea, with a 
comfort, Father of me, that I have never yet even 
even imagined ; for how shall my imagination over- 
take Thy swift heart ? I care not for the pain, so long 
as my spirit is strong, and into Thy hands I commend 
that spirit. If Thy love which is better than life, 
receive it, then surely Thy tenderness will make it 
great. 

cccxv. 

He who loves not his brother for deeper reasons 
than those of a common parentage will cease to love 



GOD THE FA THER. 281 

him at all. The love that enlarges not its borders, 
that is not ever spreading and including, and deepen- 
ing, will contract, shrivel, decay, die. I have had the 
sons of my mother that I may learn the universal 
brotherhood. For there is a bond between me and 
the most wretched liar that ever died for the murder 
he would not even confess, closer, infinitely, than 
that which springs only from having one father and 
mother. That we are the sons and daughters of God, 
born from His heart, the outcoming offspring of His 
love, is a bond closer, than all other bonds in one. 
No man ever loved his child aright, who did not love 
him for his humanity, for his divinity, to the utter for- 
getting of his origin, from himself. The son of my 
mother is indeed my brother by this greater and 
closer bond as well ; but if I recognize that bond 
between him and me at all, I recognize it for my race. 
True, and thank God ! the greater excludes not the 
less ; it makes all the weaker bonds stronger and 
truer, nor forbids that where all are brothers, some 
should be those of our bosom. Still my brother ac- 
cording to the flesh is my first neighbor that we may 
be very nigh to each other, whether we will or no, 
while our hearts are tender, and so may learn brother- 
hood. For our love to each other is but the throb- 
bing of the heart of the great brotherhood, and could 
come only from the eternal Father, not from our 
parents. 



282 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

CCCXVI. 

The highest condition of the Human Will, as dis- 
tinct, not as separated from God, is when, not seeing 
God, not seeming to grasp Him at all, it yet holds 
Him fast. It cannot continue in this condition, for 
not finding, not seeing God, the man would die ; but 
the will thus asserting itself, the man has passed from 
death unto life, and the vision is nigh at hand. Then 
first thus free in thus asserting its freedom, is the 
individual will one with the Will of God ; the child is 
finally restored to the father ; the childhood and the 
fatherhood meet in one ; the brotherhood of the race 
arises from the dust, and the prayer of our Lord is 
answered, " I in them and thou in me, that they may 
be made perfect in one." Let us then, arise in God- 
born strength every time that we feel the darkness 
closing, or become aware that it has closed around 
us, and say, "lam of the Light and not of the Dark- 
ness." Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, 
but thou art bound to arise, God loves thee whether 
thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou 
wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee 
to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art 
not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes 
not because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial 
tenderness of love towards thee for that thou art in 
the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad when 



GOD THE FA THER. 283 

thou dost arise and say, " I will go to my Father." 
For He sees thee through all the gloom through which 
thou canst not see Him. Will thou His will. Say to 
Him, " My God, I am very dull and low and hard ; 
but Thou art wise and high and tender, and Thou art 
my God. I am Thy child. Forsake me not." Then 
fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in quietness until 
light goes up in the darkness. Fold the arms of thy 
Faith I say, but not of thy Action : bethink thee of 
something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, 
if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing 
of a meal, or a visit to a friend: Heed not thy feel- 
ings : do thy work. 

As God lives by His own will, and we live in Him, 
so has He given us power to will in ourselves. How 
much better should we not fare if, finding that we are 
standing with our heads bowed away from the good, 
finding that we have no feeble inclination to seek the 
source of our life, we should yet will upwards toward 
God, rousing that essence of life in us, which He has 
given us from His own heart, to call again upon Him 
who is our Life, who can fill the emptiest heart, rouse 
the deadest conscience, quicken the dullest feeling, 
and strengthen the feeblest will. 

Then, if ever the time should come, as perhaps it 
must come to each of us, when all consciousness of 
well-being shall have vanished, when the earth shall 
be but a sterile promontory, and the heavens a dull 



284 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

and pestilent congregation of vapors, when man nor 
woman shall delight us more, nay, when God Himself 
shall be but a name, and Jesus an old story, then, even 
then, when a Death far worse than " that phantom of 
grisly bone," is griping at our hearts, and having 
slain love, hope, faith, forces existence upon us only 
in agon}', then, even then, we shall be able to cry out 
with our Lord, " My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
saken me ? " Nor shall we die then, I think, without 
being able to take up His last words as well, and say, 
" Father into thy hands I commend my spirit." 

CCCXVII. 

Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fulness 
of the treasures of the Godhead, than our imagination 
can touch their measure. Of Him not a thought, not 
a joy, not a hope of one of His creatures can pass un- 
seen ; and while one of them remains unsatisfied, He 
is not Lord over all. 

Therefore with angels and with archangels, with the 
spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children 
of the kingdom, yea, with the Lord Himself, and for 
all them that know Him not, we praise and magnify 
and laud His name in itself, saying, Our Father. We 
do not draw back for that we are unworthy, nor even 
for that we are hard-hearted, and care not for the 
good. For it is His childlikeness that makes Him our 



GOD THE FATHER. 285 

God and Father. The perfection of His relation to 
us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, 
all our evils ; for our childhood is born of His father- 
hood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to 
God in the utter death of his feelings and his desires, 
without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of 
low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forget- 
fulness, and say to Him " Thou art my refuge, because 
Thou art my home." 

CCCXVIII. 

That every man has affairs, and those his first af- 
fairs with God, stands to the reason of every man who 
associates any meaning or feeling with the words, 
Maker, Father, God. Were we but children of a 
day, with the understanding that some one had given 
us that one holiday, there would be something to be 
thought, to be felt, to be done, because we knew it. 
For then our nature would be according to our fate, 
and we could worship and die. But it would be only 
the praise of the dead, not the praise of the living, for 
death would be the deepest, the lasting, the overcom- 
ing. We should have come out of nothingness, not 
out of God. He could only be our Maker, .not our 
Father, our Origin. But now we know that God can- 
not be the God of the dead — must be the God of 
the living ; inasmuch as to know that we died, would 



286 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

freeze the heart of worship, and we could not say Our 
God, or feel Him worthy, of such Worth-ship as we 
could render. To him who offers unto this God of 
the living his own self of sacrifice, to him that over- 
cometh, him who has brought his individual life back 
to its source, who knows that he is one of God's chil- 
dren thus one of the Father's making, He giveth the 
white stone. To him who climbs on the stair of all 
his God-born efforts and God-given victories up to 
the height of his being — that of looking face to face 
upon his ideal self in the bosom of the Father — God's 
him, realized in him through the Father's love in the 
Elder Brother's devotion — to him God gives the new 
name written. 

Moreover the name is one " which no man knoweth 
saving he which receiveth it." Not only then has 
each man his individual relation to God, but each 
man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a 
peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that 
of no one else ; for when he is perfected he shall 
receive the new name which no one else can under- 
stand. Hence he can worship God as no man else 
can worship Him — can understand God as no man 
else can understand Him. As the fir tree lifts up itself 
with a far different need from the need of the palm- 
tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up 
a different humanity to the common Father. And for 
each God has a different response. With every man 



GOD THE FA THER. 287 

He has a secret — the secret of the new name. In 
every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of 
peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not 
it is the innermost chamber — but a chamber into which 
no brother, nay, no sister can come. 

From this it follows that there is a chamber also — 
(O God, humble and accept my speech) — a chamber 
in God Himself, into which none can enter but the 
one, the individual, the peculiar man — out of which 
chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength 
for his brethren. This is that for which he was made 
— to reveal the secret things of the Father. 

Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spirit- 
ual garden of God — precious each for his own sake, 
in the eyes of Him who is even now making us — 
each of us watered and shone upon and filled with 
life, for the sake of his flower, his completed being, 
which will blossom out of him at last to the glory 
and pleasure of the great gardener. For each has 
within him a secret of the Divinity ; each is .growing 
towards the revelation of that secret to himself, and 
so to the full reception, according to his measure of 
the divine. Every moment that he is true to his true 
self, some new shine of the white stone, breaks on his 
mind's eye, some fresh channel is opened upward for 
the coming glory of the flower, the conscious offering 
of his whole being in beauty to the Maker. Each 
man, then, is in God's sight worth. Life and action, 



288 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

thought and intent, are sacred. And what an end 
lies before us ! To have a consciousness of our own 
ideal being flashed into us from the thought of God ! 
Surely for this we may well give way all our paltry self- 
consciousnesses, our self -admirations and self-worships 1 
Surely to know what He thinks about us will pale out 
of our souls all our thoughts about ourselves ! 

CCCXIX. 

Our Lord became flesh, but did not become man. 
He took on Him the form of man; He was man 
already. And He was, is, and ever shall be, divinely 
child-like. He could never have been a child if He 
would ever have ceased to be a child, for in Him the 
transient found nothing. Childhood belongs to the 
divine nature. Obedience, then, is as divine as Will. 
Service as divine as Rule. How ? Because they are 
one in their nature ; they are both a doing of the 
truth. The love in them is the same. The Father- 
hood and the Sonship are one, save that the Father- 
hood looks down lovingly, and the Sonship looks up 
lovingly. Love is all. And God is all in all. 

cccxx. 

For three and thirty years, a living seed, 

A lonely gem, dropt on our waste world's side, 

Thy death and rising Thou didst calmly bide ; 



GOD THE SON. 289 

Love companied by many a clinging weed 

Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and of need ; 

Hither and thither tossed and by friends denied ; 

Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride 

Until at length was done the awful deed, 

And Thou didst lie outworn in stony bower. 

Three days asleep — oh, slumber God-like brief. 

For men of sorrows and acquaint with grief I 

Heaven's seed Thou diedst, that out of Thee might tower 

Aloft with rooted stem and shadowy leaf, 

Of all humanity the crimson flower. 

CCCXXI. 

How could the Son of God be tempted? If any 
one say that He was not moved by those temptations 
in the' wilderness, he must be told that then there were 
no temptations to Him, and He was not tempted ; 
nor was His victory of more significance than that of 
the man who, tempted to bear false witness against 
his neighbor, abstains from robbing him of his goods. 
For human need, struggle and hope, it bears no mean- 
ing ; and we must reject the whole as a fantastic folly 
of crude invention; a mere stage-show ; a lie for the 
poor sake of the fancied truth : a doing of evil that 
good might come ; and, with how many fragments 
soever of truth its mind may be filled, not in any way 
to be received as a divine message. 

But asserting that there were real temptations, if the 
story is to be received at all, am I not involving 



290 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

myself in a greater difficulty still ? For how could the 
Son of God be tempted with evil — with that which 
must to Him appear in its true colors of discord, its 
true shapes of deformity ? Or how could He then be 
the Son of His Father who cannot be tempted with 
evil? 

In the answer to this lies the centre, the essential 
germ of the whole interpretation : He was not tempted 
with Evil but with Good ; with inferior forms of good, 
that is, pressing in upon Him, while the higher forms 
of good held themselves aloof, biding their time, that 
is, God's time. I do not believe that the Son of God 
could be tempted with evil, but I do believe that He 
could be tempted with good — to yield to which temp- 
tation would have been evil in Him — ruin to the 
universe. 

CCCXXII. 

To the Son of God the will of God is Life. It was 
a temptation to show the powers of the world that He 
was the Son of God ; that to Him the elements were 
subject ; that He was above the laws of Nature, be- 
cause He was the Eternal Son ; and thus stop the 
raging of the heathen, and the vain imaginations of 
the people. It would be but to shew them the truth. 
But He was the Son of God : what was His Father's 
will ? Such was not the divine way of convincing the 
world of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. If the 



GOD THE SON. 291 

Father told Him to cast Himself down, that moment 
the pinnacle pointed naked to the sky. If the devil 
threw Him down, let God send His angels ; or, if 
better, allow Him to be dashed to pieces in the valley 
below. But never will He forestall the divine will. 
The Father shall order what comes next. The Son 
will obey. In the path of His work He will turn aside 
for no stone. There let the angels bear Him in their 
hands if need be. But He will not choose the path 
because there is a stone in it. He will not choose at 
all. He will go where the Spirit leads Him. 

CCCXXIII. 

Everything in God's doing comes harmoniously with 
and from all the rest. Son of Man, His history shall 
be a man's history, shall be The Man's history. Shall 
that begin with an exception ? Yet it might well be 
a temptation to Him who longed to do all He could 
for men. He was the Son of God : why should not 
the sons of God know it ? 

But as this temptation in the wilderness was an 
epitome and type of the temptations to come, against 
which for forty days He had been making Himself 
strong, revolving truth beyond our reach, in whose 
light every commonest duty was awful and divine, a 
vision fit almost, to oppress a God in His humiliation, 
so shall we understand the whole better if we look 



292 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

at His life in relation to it. As He refused to make 
stones bread, so throughout that life He never wrought 
a miracle to help himself ; as He refused to cast Him- 
self from the temple to convince Satan, or glory visibly 
in His Sonship, so He steadily refused to give the sign 
which the human Satans demanded, notwithstanding 
the offer of conviction which they held forth to bribe 
Him to the grant. How easy it seems to have con- 
founded them, and strengthened His followers. But 
such conviction would stand in the way of a better 
conviction to His disciples, and would do His adversa- 
ries only harm. For neither could in any true 
sense, be convinced by such a show : it could but prove 
His power. It might prove so far the presence of a 
God ; but would it prove that God ? Would it bring 
Him nearer to them, who could not see Him in the 
face of His Son ? To say Thou art God, without 
knowing what the Thou means — of what use is it? 
God is a name only except we know God. Our Lord 
did not care to be so acknowledged. 

CCCXXIV. 

Not all the sovereignty of God, as the theologians 
call it, delegated to the Son and administered by the 
wisdom of the Spirit that was given to Him without 
measure, could have wrought the kingdom of heaven 
in one corner of our earth. Nothing but the obedi- 



GOD THE SON. 293 

ence of the Son, the obedience unto the death, the ab- 
solute doing of the will of God because it was the truth 
could redeem the prisoner, the widow, the orphan ; 
but it would redeem them by redeeming the conquest- 
ridden-conqueror too, the stripe-giving jailer, the unjust 
judge, the devouring Pharisee himself, with the insati- 
able moth-eaten heart. The earth should be free 
because Love was stronger than Death. Therefore 
should fierceness and wrong and hypocrisy and God- 
service play out their weary play. He would not pluck 
the spreading branches of the tree ; He would lay the 
axe to its roots. It would take time ; but the tree 
would be dead at last — dead, and cast into the lake 
of fire. It would take time ; but His Father had time 
enough and to spare. It would take courage and 
strength and self-denial and endurance ; but His 
Father could give Him all ! It would cost pain of 
body and mind, yea, agony and torture ; but those He 
was ready to take on Himself. It would cost him the 
vision of many sad and, to all but Him, hopeless sights ; 
He must see tears without wiping them, hear sighs 
without changing them into laughter, see the dead lie, 
and let them lie ; see Rachael weeping for her chil- 
dren and refusing to be comforted ; He must look on 
His brothers and sisters crying as children over their 
broken toys, and must not mend them : *He must go 
on to the grave, and they not know that thus He was 
setting all things right for them. His work must be 



294 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

one with and completing God's Creation and God's 
History. 

CCCXXV. 

It is with the holiest fear that we should approach 
the terrible fact of the sufferings of our Lord. Let no 
one think that those were less because He was more. 
The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all 
that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more 
does it feel the antagonism of pain ; the inroad of 
death upon life ; the more dreadful is that breach of 
the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He 
felt more than man can feel, because he had a larger 
feeling. He was even therefore worn out sooner than 
another man would have been. These sufferings were 
awful indeed when they began to invade the region 
about the will ; when the struggle to keep consciously 
trusting in God began to sink in darkness ; when 
the Will of the man put forth its last determined 
effort in that cry after the vanishing vision of the 
Father : My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? 
Never had it been so with Him before. Never before 
had He been unable to see God beside Him. Yet 
never was God nearer to Him than now. For never 
was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not 
feel Him near; and yet it is " My God" that He cries. 

Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when 
His faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. 



GOD THE SON. 295 

It has wo feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to 
absorb it. It stands naked in His souk and tortured, 
as He stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure 
and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for 
God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry, My God. The 
cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace, out of 
hope. Not even out of suffering comes that cry. It 
was a cry in desolation, but it came out of Faith. 
It is the last voice of truth, speaking when it can but 
cry. The divine horror of that moment is unfathom- 
able by human soul. It was blackness of darkness. 
And yet He would believe. Yet He would hold fast. 
God was His God yet. My God — and in the cry 
came forth the victory, and all was over soon. Of the 
peace that followed that cry, the peace of a perfect 
soul, large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as 
life, victories for God and His brethren, He Himself 
alone can ever know the breadth and length, and 
depth and height. 

CCCXXVI. 

Despised! Rejected by the priest-led roar 

Of multitudes ! The imperial purple flung 

Around the form the hissing scourge had wrung 1 

To the bare truth dear witnessing, before 

The false, and trembling true ! As on the shore 

Of infinite love and truth, I kneel among 

The blood-prints, and with dumb adoring tongue. 



296 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

Say to the naked man who ere while wore 
The love*wove garment — " Witness to the truth, 
Crowned by the witnessing, Thou art King I 
With Thee I die, to live in worshipping. 
O human God ! O brother, eldest born ! 
Never but Thee was there a man in sooth ! 
Never a true crown but Thy crown of thorns 1 " 

CCCXXVII. 

The Son of God is the Father of men giving to 
them of his Spirit — that Spirit which manifests the 
deep things of God, being to a man the mind of Christ 
the great heresy of the church of the present day in 
unbelief in this Spirit. The mass of the church does 
not believe that the Spirit has a revelation for every 
man individually — a revelation as different from the 
revelation of the Bible, as the food in the moment of 
passing into living brain and nerve, differs from the 
bread and meat. 

CCCXXVIII. 

4 

The Spirit of God is the Father whose influence is 
known by its witnessing with our spirit. But may there 
not be other powers and means of the Spirit prepara- 
tory to this its highest office with man? God who 
has made us can never be far from any man who draws 
the breath of life — nay, must be in him ; not neces- 



GOD THE SPIRIT. 297 

sarily in his heart, as we say, but still in him. May 
not then one day some terrible convulsion from the 
centre of his being, some fearful earthquake from the 
hidden gulfs of his nature, shake even the most de- 
praved of men through all the deafness of his death ; 
the voice of the Spirit may be faintly heard, the still 
small voice that comes after the tempest and the earth- 
quake ? May there not be a fire even such will feel ? 
Who shall set bounds to the consuming of the fire 
of our God, and the purifying that dwells therein ? 

CCCXXIX. 

A man will please God better by believing some 
things that are not told him, than by confining his faith 
to those things that are expressly said — said to arouse 
in us the truth-seeing faculty, the spiritual desire, the 
prayer for the good things which God will give to them 
that ask Him. 

" But is not this dangerous doctrine ? Will not a 
man be taught thus to believe the things he likes best, 
even to pray for that which he likes best ? And will 
he not grow arrogant in his confidence ? " 

If it be true that the Spirit strives with our spirit ; 
if it be true that God teaches men, we may safely leave 
those dreaded results to him. If the man is of the 
Lord's company, he is safer with him than with those 
who would secure their safety by hanging on the out- 



298 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

skirts and daring nothing. If he is not taught of God 
in that which he hopes for, God will let him know it. 
He will receive something else than he prays for. If 
he can pray to God for anything not good, the answer 
will come in the blazes of the consuming fire. These 
will soon bring him to some of his spiritual senses. 
But it will be far better for him to be thus sharply 
tutored, than to go on a snail's pace in the journey 
of the spiritual life. And for arrogance, I have seen 
nothing breed it faster or in more offensive forms than 
the worship of the letter. 

cccxxx. 

Some natures will endure an immense amount of 
misery before they feel compelled to look for help 
whence all help and healing comes. They cannot be- 
lieve that there is verily an unseen mysterious power, 
till the world and all that is in it has vanished in the 
smoke of despair; till cause and effect is nothing to 
the intellect, and possible glories have faded from the 
imagination; then, deprived of all that made life 
pleasant or hopeful, the immortal essence, lonely and 
wretched and unable to cease, looks up with its now 
unfettered and wakened instinct to the source of its 
own life — to the possible God who may yet perhaps 
hear this wretched creature that calls. In this lone- 
liness of despair, life must find The Life for joy is 



GOD THE SPIRIT. 299 

gone, and life is all that is left ; it is compelled to 
seek its source, its root, its eternal life. This alone 
remains as a possible thing. Strange condition of 
despair with which the Spirit of God drives a man — 
a condition in which the Best alone is the Possible. 

CCCXXXI. 

Shall God's thoughts be surpassed by man's thoughts ? 
God's giving by man's asking? God's creation by 
man's imagination ? No. Let us climb to the height 
of our Alpine desires ; let us leave them behind us 
and ascend the spear-pointed Himmalays of our aspi- 
rations ; still shall we find the depth of God's sap- 
phire above us ; still shall we find the heavens higher 
than the earth, and His thoughts and ways higher 
than our thoughts and ways. 

Ah Lord ! be Thou in all our being ; as not in the 
Sundays of our time alone, so not in the chambers of 
our hearts alone. We dare not think that Thou canst 
not, carest not; that some things are not for Thy be- 
holding, some questions not to be asked of Thee. 
For are we not all Thine — uttterly Thine ? That 
which a man speaks not to His fellow, we speak to 
Thee. Our very passions we hold up to Thee, and 
say, " Behold, Lord ! Think about us ; for Thou hast 
made us." We would not escape from our history by 
fleeing into the wilderness, by hiding our heads in the 



300 CHEERFUL WORDS. 

sands of forgetfulness, or the repentance that comes 
of pain, or the lethargy of hopefulness. We take it 
as our very life, in our hand, and flee with it unto 
Thee. Triumphant is the answer which Thou^ holdest 
for every doubt. It may be we could not understand 
it yet, even if Thou didst speak it " with most miracu- 
lous organ." But Thou shalt at least find faith in 
the earth, O Lord, if Thou comest to look for it 
now — the faith of ignorant but hoping children, who 
know that they do not know, and believe that Thou 
knowest. 



INDEX 



Argument 63 

Artist, The 247 

Aspiration 29 

Beauty 196 

Bible, The 50 

Birth, The New 114 

Christian, The True 231 

Christianity, Heart Of 120 

Contentment 65 

Conversion 164 

Courage 149 

Death 96 

Discipline 147 

Duty 88 

Doubt 188 

Dreams 143 

Education 123 

Example iqo 

Existence 241 

Faith 133 

Food . 262 

Forgiveness 221 

Friendship. 167 

God The Father 276 

God The Son ........ 288 

God The Spirit 296 

God in Nature 55 

Health 152 

ccci 



Index. 



PAGK. 

Home . 169 

Homesickness 44 

Hopefulness 210 

Humanity 161 

Human Nature 38 

Humility 76 

Imagination, The . 144 

Immortality 269 

Life, The Other 176 

Life's Journey 46 

Longing . 267 

Love 126 

Memory 250 

Moods . . 172 

Obedience 205 

Old Age 32 

Parson, The 52 

Poetry, True ........ 30 

Prayer 140 

Poet, The 154 

Providences, Special 86 

Rest 48 

Resurrections , 103 

Rich and Poor 67 

Sabbath, The 138 

Sacrifice 227 

Self Examination . . . . . . . 209 

Service 158 

Sleep 264 

Sea, By The 255 

Sin 183 

Sincerity . 92 

Sorrow 156 

Trust in God . 13 

Truth 81 

Woman 258 

Work 137 

Worship 193 



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